Portraits of a Marriage
by Uberscribbler
Summary: Scenes in the not-so-secretly married life of a reluctant CAG and his hotshot/problem pilot, starting at the end of their worlds and going forward and sometimes backwards. AU natch, infrequently updated, and NOT for kids!
1. First Canvas

_Written for wisteria's porn battle. Prompt is_ _BSG, Kara/Lee/__Secretly Married. Setting: during the miniseries. Purpose: pure fluffy, wet enjoyment! This is un-beta'd, so a better version may come later. Let me know whatcha think!_

**Portrait of a Marriage.**

Kara Thrace found herself back in hack, on the one frakking day of her life she absolutely did _not_ want to be there. The fact she'd been interned for the perfectly legitimate act of hitting a superior asshole added all sorts of irony to the situation she was ill-disposed to examine.

To alleviate the boredom, she'd taken to doing push-ups, missing how the brig's door opened and shut nearly silently.

"Well, this looks familiar," someone said. She instantly recognized the voice's owner, and out of sheer spite she just kept on doing her push-ups. If _he_ wanted to talk to her, he could frakking well address her by name for a change; none of this 'dear' or 'my love' bullshit.

"Are you going to keep holding the same grudge?"

_Frak yeah!_At least that's what she would have said, if she weren't concentrating so hard on keeping her heart from stopping every frakking time the frakker opened his frakking mouth when she was in frakking earshot.

"Kara? I'm sorry."

Frak! He had to go and say the one thing that would rob her righteous steam wouldn't he? She stood and glared at the figure on the opposite side of the bars. "What're you doing here?"

Lee Adama shrugged carelessly. "Orders are for me to fly in the decommissioning ceremony."

"I know that, frakhead." It had been literally all she could think about for the last ten days, ever since the CAG had announced Captain Lee Adama was going to fly point in the final fly-by. This meant for he'd be _her _wingman, that _they_ would be in the sky _together_. She'd been so damned good for the last nine days, keeping her nose clean and keeping the tension to a minimum.

And then Tigh had to go and throw a damned table at her.

Kara stepped closer, silently cheering how he refused to back away despite the clear threat on her face. "I mean, what are you doing down here, in hack, within arm's reach?"

He smirked that devastating smirk of his; the one that basically turned her knees to jelly the first time they'd met which had led to…

"I believe I'm talking to the woman who is listed on some transfer paperwork as _my_ legal next of kin."

"Oh."

"Yeah. Imagine my surprise."

Frak. They never actually _talked_ about that night, did they? About what it would mean down the road, like when they'd be on the same ship. Lee could make all the noise he wanted about quitting, but she couldn't see it happening. They'd talked about everything else, logistics and shared accounts and what color the porch-swing would be, but _never _their ranks and positions.

"I, uh, didn't think it would, y'know, make it through."

"That what wouldn't 'make it through', Kara?" Lee Adama mimicked quotation marks, then reached through the bars and grasped her by the belt, pulling her flush against the iron. His tone left no room for evasion. "Where you put the check-mark under 'Marital Status'?" His oh-so-talented fingers didn't stop at the belt, easily slipping into her fly. "Or the barely legible scrawl that nevertheless looks suspiciously like 'Leland J. Adama' beside the word 'Spouse'?"

Kara knew she should have tried to explain, how honesty and faith and the fact she was (all protests aside) well and truly _committed_ to this. Sadly, she found herself having a hard time thinking of anything beyond the need to push those probing digits further _in._"Um," she panted, fighting for mental traction. "Guess...this means...ah, frak...my transfers in the...in the toilet...huh?"

"Oh, no, Kara. You're still coming to the _Atlantia_." Lee's fingers stroked and probed with the ease of experience.

"I am?" Ever since Tauron and that wonderfully accommodating Priest, she'd taken to reading her way through the full Orders of the Fleet, searching for some loop-hole that wouldn't leave _them_ in the tank.

"You're still gonna be my wingman, my hotshot problem pilot, and the woman no other dares touch," Lee assured her.

"Ha…ha…" Those damned fingers of his, the ones she dreamed about every fourth or fifth night (only because the rest of the dream-him needed a rest), were robbing her of speech as surely as she'd robbed them of choice. "How?" she finally managed.

"Don't ask, don't tell."

There was an evil snicker under those words. She couldn't process words anymore and just surrendered to him, like she always did. "Heh. Great thing...we hadda...get...yeah, there...say we were...gettin' married..."

"_You_ said we were getting married. _I_ just went along with it so we could get out of a bunch of police interviews about how you and I managed to put six men in traction." Lee grimaced. "Just our luck there was Priest there."

"Ha. You love it, being the bad boy...ah!" He stabbed three fingers into her, making it clear this was merely a precursor for what was to come, as well as to shut her up. What should have been a drunk-and-disorderly had nearly become an assault-and-battery; her claiming he was defending her honor _seemed_ like a brilliant dodge and perfect escape hatch.

The gods apparently had other ideas for them, as they'd made sure an actual Priest was on the premises, one who was so frakking solicitous that he sworn them together in front of ten policemen.

Only in retrospect did he understand her refusal to have it annulled. The weeks and years since had made it all so clear.

He pulled his fingers free of her, enjoying her shocked eyes. He enjoyed even more how her shoulders trembled as he stood back, and how she jumped and flushed when he pulled the cell door open (how the frak did she fly so well yet get distracted so easily she didn't notice he'd unlocked the door?). Oh, she was ready for him, as always.

So frakking easy and it never failed to piss him off. His hands were on her shoulders, circling her muscled arms, shoving her back into the cell and against the wall with enough force to vibrate the ship. "Have your eyes been wandering?" he growled, the familiar game between them giving a conduit to the unfamiliar, uncontrolled emotions she invoked.

Kara understood this intuitively, having conceived the game herself for the same reasons, and played her part. "There's no-one..." she muttered, looking at nothing over his shoulder.

"Liar!" He brought himself flush with her, his lips smashing down on her's. "I've seen them. All the pretty boy and girl pilots."

"No-one!" she swore, meeting his eyes full on now. He needed this. He needed _her. _

She was no less deprived, and no less needing. "No-one…touches me…except…you!"

With another snarl, Lee grabbed her left hand and brought her fingers to his nose. "Liar," he purred.

"It's _you_ guiding my hand," she purred back. Her hand snaking down and finding him, hard and ready, sealed the deal. "Just like _I_ guide _yours_."

"_Mine_." Her zipper nearly tore from the force of its opening.

"Yours." She stroked him through his pants, feeling wood becoming stone, making short work of his own belt and zipper.

"Now show me what's _mine_."

These were the last words she'd utter, at least for the next two hours.

* * *

Later, in the afterglow, came the epiphany.

They knew without words between them how this would be how it was and would be, both there and then and for the rest of their lives.

They would fight. They would frak.

The worlds could (and would) end in fire and they would walk through it, unscathed, to stand at the other's side.

If another sought to intrude on their dance, be they statesman or celebrity or seductress, they'd be lucky to escape with their lives.

If she were lost, he would move moons and mountains to find her.

If he were adrift, she would be his beacon home.

If she died, she would find his way back to him, no matter if she had to swim across Styx itself. As would he to return to her.

Through it all would be _them_, fighting and frakking _together. _Until the day the gods called them both to Elysium; and even then, they would leave only as one.

* * *

_Some marriage,_ they would snicker sometimes, both in secret and later in public. All the while, the rest of the universe and all its gods looked on with envy at something so perfect.

* * *

He rose and dressed silently, their promises to each other marking each other's flesh.

There were no good-byes. Not for them. Never for them.

Kara let herself drift into a light nap, her dreams of the future as bright and shinning as ever.

**Fin.**


	2. Second Canvas

_I own none of the characters and won't make money off this even if it's offered. The Porn Battle strikes again! The prompt this time was "bruise". This is unbeta'ed, probably senseless, and barely qualifies imo as worth the bytes. I'm not going to waste my beta's time on it, so all errors are therefore my own idiot fault._

_This takes place an hour or so after the final scene of "33". It otherwise has no ties to the series itself and builds on my previous PB piece. If you feel inclined, please drop a line and tell me to get my lazy arse back to work on more worthwhile stuff._

* * *

**Portraits of a Marriage - Second Canvas**

Apollo found Starbuck the first place he'd looked: in the Senior Pilots Bunkroom and half-out of her flight suit. She was exchanging a joke or something humorous with Flat Top, causing both to laugh heartily. It was a beautiful sound, and it had him clenching both fists with the urge to bury both into Saunders's face.

Instead he barked out "Starbuck! With me! Now!" He marched out of the ready room, not waiting to see if she'd heard or was following. He knew damned well she had, and was.

His father's ineffectual reassurance was still ringing in his ears. "A man has to live with his actions." Certainly he'd made enough 'decisions' in the ten days since the worlds ended. Shooting down the _Olympic Carrier_ was just the cap of it all.

After he'd finished the flight chart, he'd sought out the one constant in his life: his secret wife of these last three years. They'd seen each other barely a dozen times since that bizarre and violent night on Tauron, yet just the thought of her brought him nothing but peace and chaos in equal measure.

It was the latter that had been the most prevalent in the last six months, given she'd been aboard _Galactica_, without _him_. It was irrational, he knew. But the knowledge that she'd been flying, laughing, fighting -- _showering -- _with the rest of the pilots aboard -- that she'd been showing _all_ of herself to _them_ -- and that there was no sign or mark to warn them she was _unavailable_ --

It'd been driving him insane all that time.

It had to stop. It was going to stop, right frakking now!

He just hoped he could live with what was he was about to do.

* * *

Half-way to his office, he paused and glanced back, mainly for effect; as expected, she was practically on his heels, looking cocky and confident as ever. That all stopped when he spun and shoved her by the shoulders into the nearby utility closet. She actually seemed surprised, but what did she expect? That two hours in a brig cell would make up for a year apart?

There was no preamble or warning. Lee merely took her collar in both hands and pulled her mouth to his. His tongue forced its way past her teeth, no apology or explanation offered. Starbuck was hardly idle herself, pushing ineffectually on his shoulders for several moments. It took a double-fist to the solar plexus to force Apollo to retreat just a hair.

That wasn't the end of it, however. Kara Thrace wouldn't let it. It was her turn to grab his collar and pull him to her. So intent on plundering his mouth, it didn't register Apollo's hands were already at work on her suit.

His fingers were suddenly on her skin, pulling her bra away and hands worrying her now stone-hard nipples. It was just seconds later that Apollo took them between his fingertips, hard, and twisted both even harder.

Kara couldn't stop the moan that resulted, head thrown back in momentary ecstasy. Her pulling back as she did gave Lee the space he needed. Dipping his head, keeping a bruising hold on her arms, he applied a no-less bruising bite to the left breast. He'd spent months _dreamed_of those well developed mammaries, and now that he had them --

Now Lee was the distracted one, missing how his wife's practiced fingers were pulling his own suit aside. Her nails raked across his flesh without the slightest care. It wasn't enough to force him to release her breast, but enough to elicit a moan of his own.

It was just the start, for them both.

* * *

The next day would inevitably have tongue wagging. It was expected. It helped more than anyone could know.

Kara didn't try to conceal the marks on her breasts, her arms, her thighs, or her neck. There were simply too many in evidence. Only the ones in places hidden from easy sight, which wouldn't heal easily or quickly, _those_ she kept to herself.

And her pace for the next three days was controlled and careful. Overly so; the way one walks to compensate for aches in the most intimate places. She offered not one word of complaint or discomfort for it either.

Lee was in little better shape. His upper half was like a roadmap of welts, ones deep and bloody and lasting. His lower half sported a few as well, although most he managed to keep obscured.

Unlike his wife, he didn't wince as he walked. But standing at the toilet was a wholly different story, and would be so for the remainder of the month.

Starbuck wouldn't move her gear out of the communal bunkroom. He woulnd't press the issue, for a variety of reasons that were no-one's business save theirs.

Apollo made it a point to keep the unruly Starbuck under his official thumb, summarily appointing her his DCAG, which involved many meetings that would last well into the evening.

And if anyone noticed how little eye-contact there was between the CAG and his deputy, or how few words ever seemed to be exchanged between them, or how easily one read the other's intentions and moved to act upon them before they were spoken -- well, wasn't that kind of familiarity wingmen were _supposed_ to have?

* * *

That night ended on a slightly different note, however.

"Frakker," Kara Thrace hissed at her husband when they were finally spent, limbs tangled, skins shinning and slick. It was a struggle to pry open just one eye to glare at him, but she managed.

"Complaining?" Lee Adama rejoined to his wife, eyes fighting to focus on her face, willing himself to move about so her elbow was digging into him at that so painful angle.

Her head came to settle onto his chest, nostrils flaring and inhaling all that he was.

"Never."

His fingers ran over the expanse of her hip and thigh, the tactile memory burning into his consciousness.

"Good."

They lay there for a time after that, silently communicating through touch and more primal languages. After all, what more was there to say aloud? They'd marked their territory for all to see, their flesh as canvas for the other's unique artistry.

* * *

In the days and years to come, most of their pilots would snicker and make jokes, thinking outrageous things, never suspecting how close (and far) from the truth they were.

* * *

_Some marriage_, they themselves would snicker from time to time, privately and later openly.

The rest of the universe would just look on with envy.

* * *

They would sleep there, momentarily content to let the universe and whatever future it offered – whether bright or otherwise – to go frak itself for a little while.

_Fin._


	3. Early Pencil Sketch

_Another 'PornBattle', another "Portraits" installment. Unbeta'd ('cos I respect my team too much to waste their time with this stuff) and smutty silliness. I don't own the characters or ideas behind them, so I'm writing for my personal enjoyment and no material profit. Enjoy and review, please._

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* * *

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Portraits of a Marriage - Early Pencil Sketch

Kara Thrace never dreamed her perchant for 'quickies' extended to marriages as well as casual encounters in bars. Not that she ever imagined herself as marriable to begin with – too many vices, too little genuine worth. The fact that she and her _husband_ – one Lee Adama – had been married not two hours earlier by a sloshed Orthodox Priest in the drunk tank of a cop-shop on Tauron, their collective breaths enough to knock over an ox, simply added extra levels of unreality to it all.

Were it not for her whiskey-soaked-yet-strangely-lucid husband having laid her over the coffee table of their newly acquired hotel room -- and that he was busy stripping her down with an efficiency that almost looked practiced -- Kara might well have dismissed the whole thing as an alcoholic phantasm. Certainly she'd had less pleasant encounters and dreams in the last year --

The feel of Adama's lightly cauloused fingers gently worrying her nipples killed that thought dead. Some variation of _This is real. This is going to happen. Its going to happen right frakking now! _kept looping through her head. This didn't frighten her in the slightest, where by rights she should have pushed the man -- her husband -- off her and run for the spaceport.

Instead, her body arched into his increasingly vigorous touches, her own hands joining in and fumbling with the catches of his own uniform. She wasn't quite as graceful about it as he was, which would later leave her wondering. How it was he knew his way over her body whereas she was left constantly having to rediscover his? Sure, they'd encountered each other at the Academy a few times, and there was that one time in the elevator on Solstice Eve. The fact she relived that night most every other night was beside the point as it couldn't have meant _that_ much -- to him, right?

"Tell me --" her _husband _(when had the thought become so easy?) croaked, eyes wide and boring into her's. She read something akin to fear there, and something else besides. "Tell me -- you -- you want --"

Tell him what? That she wanted him? That nothing since him had measured up? That she drank before she frakked so she wouldn't feel how empty it really was? That she'd been prowling that night because it had been exactly two hundred and fifty days since that moment on Solstice Eve, and she needed _something_ – no matter how sorrid or stupid – to fill the moment?

She could tell him these things, but knew it wouldn't really penetrate. He was too far gone in his own haze of need to see it was reflected right back to him. Instead she opted for action, one strong enough to cut through to him, straight to his heart. It required a bit of the outside-the-box thinking she so excelled at, the maneuver she envision clearing her head so thoroughly as to leave her dizzy.

Kara reached down between them with one hand, fingers finding purchase and undoing his belt, catches and zipper. The other snaked up and gripped what little hair there was on the back of his head, tugging hard as possible and drawing his eyes to her's. "I --" she began in as devout and serious a voice as she could manage, only to have to cough around a tongue that was suddenly thick with an unfamiliar emotion. She tried again, not daring to break eye-contact.

"I, Kara Artemis Thrace, do pledge myself to you."

Kara was both gratified and shaken at the rapt attention with which this was received. Her husband was staring at her with something akin to religious awe. He didn't even flinch when she freed him from his pants, gripping him tightly, lest her numb fingers let him slip away. Was it just her imagination or was he _bigger_ than she remembered?

"Forsaking all others," Kara heard her voice continue, albeit from a distance as she adjusted her position. This left her fully open to him, allowing her to press his shaft's head to her too-wet opening. That brushing touch was nearly enough to undo her completely. She managed to soldier on, sweating from the exertion such restraint required.

"Until death do us _part!_"

With the last word, Kara pushed herself forward, impaling herself and claiming her husband as was her due. She couldn't quite stop the cry of ecstasy his filling her invoked, the echo of it reaching her ears from above barely a heartbeat later.

"So say we all," her husband's whispered vow penetrated her ear as thorough as he did her body. Kara sobbed and threw her arms around his shoulders and wrapped both legs around his hips. She tried to absorb both him and this one moment in time, both into her skin and soul as he held her aloft.

It was the perfect moment, one she _knew_ would be gone – him along with it – come the dawn.

Such thoughts fled as he carried them both, still connected, to the nearby bed. They said nothing more, neither urging nor pleading nor telling the other the right spot to touch. There was no need for such instructions, not between them.

He had the body of his namesake, yet throughout the night he worshipped her form in ways even her well-exercised imagination never conceived. That she was allowed to do the same to him, her touches unworthy and technique surely wanting, were surely a gift the gods themselves would envy.

* * *

Later, when they'd finished and their bodies and strength were spent, they would snicker softly. _Some marriage_, as their shared thought, although neither knew it at the time.

Then they would sleep, hands never loosing hold of the other.

* * *

Kara Thrace woke to the light of the new day, well past dawn. She gazed on the small and unfamiliar room, feeling momentary stab of panic as at the sensation of a body pressed up behind her. A strong, solid arm was thrown possessively over her chest and something equally hard pressing against her ass cheeks.

"Good morning, _wife_," was the greeting Lee Adama offered, murmured into her neck. There was no teasing or joke in the words, which bled all tension and fear from her.

Kara wrapped her arm around his, nearly choking on her own tears and reply.

"Good morning, _husband_." She smiled as she reached down and around, carefully gripping the stiffness that was poking into her backside and repositioning them slightly, opening her legs to guide him into her core.

This was their honeymoon, after all. The future, whatever it was, could wait while they tried some _things_ out.

Together.

fin.


	4. Anatomical Sketch: Face and Head

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No porn!battle this time, just inspiration from a handful of reviews. Again, this is unbeta'd. Again, I don't own the characters or related property. This is written expressly for emotional fun and not material profit. Hope you enjoy it. Remember: review buttons are meant to be pushed!

* * *

**Portrait of a Marriage - Anatomical Sketch: Face and Head**

Lee Adama had never been able to escape Kara Thrace – not at the Academy and not afterwards – so it was only natural he ended up marrying her. It was so ridiculous that it seemed fitting it happened in the cell of a civil militia barracks on Tauron, with an inebriated Orthodox Priest presiding while he and his prettier half held each other upright, a pair of bored patrolmen acting as the legal witnesses.

That was how it was with them: the inevitable happening where and when it would, savaging their pride in the process. Well, her pride maybe; his had called 'Krypter' and ejected out of his life since the first day he'd caught her eye.

* * *

It had been three yarens ago, when he'd been just six months away from graduation. He'd heard some new hotshot second-year cadet was burning down the Sims and knocking out his records. Lee, anxious to be away from the place, publicly paid it little mind while privately seething. Suddenly the name "Starbuck" was swirling through the air and everyone was comparing him to "Starbuck" and how his record on the 'Ring Run' Sim had been "Starbucked".

His nerves were rubbed raw after just seven days of this, so day eight found Lee stalking throughout the campus like Cerberus off his chain, searching out the elusive bane to his existence. It must have showed as no-one was able to tell him where to find this "Starbuck".

Somehow he'd ended up in Maura Hall, with a gaggle of female cadets who were busy stage-whispering between themselves. The worst of them was tall specimen who'd cut her straw-colored hair short and didn't so much giggle as growl. That growl did bad things to his composure (and lower regions), making him scowl all the harder and refocus on his nominal objective, which he'd momentarily forgotten. Worse, he'd needed to keep his back to them all, lest he give any of them cause to file charges of 'Inappropriate Presentation to a Fellow Cadet'.

The fact his likely-unknowing tormentor left on the first stop, amid farewells of "See ya, Starbuck," left Lee wondering which of the Twelve Lords had decided to curse him. Likely all of them, given he realized he'd not just been hearing her name, but seeing her face everywhere over the past year.

The second-year cadet, this "Starbuck", had been a persistent face in the crowd at the cafeteria, in advanced tactics seminars, at the airfield, around every frakking corner. Only at that moment, at the height of his personal humiliation, did he realize this -- and clearly recall the reason behind it.

It had been the first days of that Term. He'd caught sight of her profile across the cafeteria, momentarily mesmerized by her and as consequence tripping over another Senior's feet. The embarrassment had been so acute, Lee had blocked the whole thing – its cause especially – from conscious thought.

* * *

The few times they'd spoken face-to-face were cool and professional -- except how it all took a whole different context and content with her, one that was evident only in hindsight

Like, for example, their discussions over tactics and Viper ordinance loads: "Payloads like that never _pack_ enough _bang_, Sir. Not in my experience. Plus which, you _shoot the whole load_ way too fast to be _satisfying._"

And the shortcomings in the avionics of the Mark VI Viper: "So, Mr. Adama, you're saying the _older model_ just doesn't have _the equipment_ to _seal the deal_? How about the _younger models_, Sir? Do they _measure up_?"

And over high-altitude maneuvers: "You really think you can just _slip it in_ and _hit the mark _after doing a triple roll at 20,000 metras?"

Lee supposed those exchanges explained the various odd looks he'd been getting lately, from the females cadets especially. His seeming non-reaction to that level of innuendo must have made him seem like he was made of stone. Nothing like a challenge to excite the already excitable, right?

Except he was anything _but_ unaffected by it all. And while he'd never had the opportunity to confront his tormentor directly, thinking back over their exchanges made him rather glad he knew where he could hide himself in the Seniors Dorm and _imagine_ other uses that mouth and those very expressive hands could be put to.

He did _a lot_ of hiding those last six months, and a lot more than just _imagine_.

* * *

Then he'd graduated, taken a berth on the _Eos_, and made point to listen for any news about "Starbuck" that came his way. He wasn't surprised to learn she was fast-tracked through Basic Flight, then summarily appointed to Flight Instructor at Delphi. He'd even found out her real name: Kara Thrace.

At that point it was all he could do to keep from calling the telephone exchange in Delphi Province and demand her home number. He instead satisfied himself with more hiding-and-imagining; a lot, _lot_ more of it this time.

* * *

A year later found him back on Caprica, ironically back at the Academy and speeding through War College. He was fine in the classroom, but jittery as Hades outside of it, constantly looking about for that damned unforgettable face of her's. Worse, he caught himself echoing her innuendo ("I'm simply saying, Sir, that _the load_ in question doesn't provide sufficient _bang_, and you have _to shoot the whole wad too early_ to…um…") at the worst moments in seminars, leaving everyone staring.

But she wasn't there, and Lee couldn't escape the insane sense that the universe was off its axis as a consequence.

He was nearly finished with his course when, on Solstice Eve, he found himself in the same elevator in the Admin Bloc as the woman who'd inserted herself into his head and soul as casually as she strolled into the car. Lee felt his throat constrict tighter and tighter ever second in her proximity. The fact she appeared unaware of his increasing distress only worsened his internal tensions, which Lee feared would snap any second and cause him to --

She suddenly reached out and pulled the Emergency Stop switch, stopping their ascent between the seventh and eighth floors. Lee was given no time to fully comprehend what happened, as Thrace immediately spun on him, throwing both arms around his neck and mashing their lips together. He stiffened (both above and below) in surprise, then tangled his fingers in her hair, adjusting the angle so he could plunder her mouth with is tongue.

Thrace pressed/pushed herself so to leave him unbalanced, his back against the wall. Her hands were all over him, opening buttons and pulling catches away, freeing him from his pants in seconds. The open air was like sandpaper on his flushed foreskin, causing him to stiffen and lengthen further. Who knew he was such a frakking masochist he'd get off on this?

Those same hands gripped him, worked him, and very nearly brought it all to a close. She must have sensed this, as she gave him a final kiss, then sank to her knees and took him into that profane and talented mouth. Lee kept his fingers in her hair, that tactile sensation the only thing keeping him from fainting as he sank fully past her lips. He urged her to take him deeper, to the point where he could feel his shaft's head scrape her throat. She didn't gag or choke or retch in doing this, her tongue gliding and massaging the underside of his cock the whole while.

Her hands weren't idle either, one cradling his balls and the other raking his hips and thighs. The sensory overload, this embarrassment of sensual riches, was proving too much. _Way_too frakking much. Lee could literally _feel_his scrotum tighten with the rest of his lower half, as if it were a battlestar's railgun readying to fire. He'd explode in her mouth and that -- _that_ was absolutely _not _acceptable.

"No," he croaked once, then louder. "No!" Gripping her hair, Lee hauled her off his cock and pulled her up. "No. Not just me," he snarled, bringing their lips together again as his free hand reached down and undid her belt and the catch of her pants. "You too, Thrace," his hoarse voice hissed. "Not just me. This is yours too."

Her answering whimper could have meant a dozen things, none of them sounding like an objection to the sentiment.

War College had taught him how to strategize his movements and actions, or rather refined his natural tendency to _think_ his way through things. There and then, his objective simply to bury himself in her as quickly as humanly possible, Lee mentally ran through a dozen scenarios of how to accomplish this. It only took seconds to reject most of them as _taking too long_, the only viable one that least savory one (to him at least; he had no idea what she would find appropriate or not).

This didn't stop him from spinning her around and pulling her back flush against his uncovered chest. Keeping one hand on her stomach, forearm brushing the undersides of her breasts, Lee pulled down her pants and underwear. He then quickly positioned himself and guided his cockhead to edge of her dewy lips. The first touch there caused him to hesitate and nearly pull back, terrified at his own aggression.

"Kara," he whispered, not realizing it was the first time he'd said her name aloud. "I --"

A shudder raced through her and into him, a full-body sob that was raw want. "Lee, please -- I ne -- need you --" Thrace, who'd been bracing herself against the wall with both arms, reached around with both and grabbed his hips, _pulling_ him into her with enough force to where she was literally sandwiched between the elevator's cold wall and his sweating body.

"Godssssss," she hissed. Lee tightened his hold on her, frightened by their shared reaction. She shook with spasms, moving in time with his ever deeper and deeper thrusts into her; he half-imagined he was lifting her off the floor doing so.

It took an age to reach the same moment, and it took no time at all. He snarled and gnashed his teeth as he emptied himself into her, and she in turn snarled and gnashed her teeth as she sank her nails into his hips so her own climax wouldn't shake her loose.

They rode the aftershocks out together, holding each other upright lest they literally fall apart.

* * *

She left on floor eight, having pulled away first and righted her clothes quicker. Lee was still recovering, and so could only pull his uniform back together. He caught the look she gave him, one of terror and worry. By the time it registered, the doors had closed and the car resumed its ascent.

Lee would inquire after her the next day and the rest of his time there. But Thrace had left the Academy grounds the previous night, departing for parts unknown. He took a chance and called her office in Delphi, only to be connected to base switchboard; he left a message, asking after her and no so subtly pleading for her to call him.

He finished his coursework and returned to the _Eos._ There was no more _hiding and remembering_after that, but Lee would hesitate a second before getting on any more elevators. He indulged in no liaisons or casual fraks, and his hand provided only the most fleeting relief. The Encounter – as he'd come to think of it – put anything and everyone he might have otherwise indulged in to shame, leaving it too shallow to be worth the time.

His desperation was such he continue to leave messages, the same message over and over, over the Delphi Base switchboard: _It's Lee Adama. Please call me. I want, I need to speak with you._

He received not one reply, not even a simple _Frak Off_.

* * *

For the next two hundred and fifty days, he would wonder constantly at that look she left him with. He was sure it hadn't been disgust, or anger. What could it have meant?

Lee found no answers, until one night when he was wasting his Liberty at a Fleet-frequented dive on Tauron, quickly ordering a double-whiskey and downing it and relishing the burn in his throat and stomach. He was about to order a second when a commotion caused him to turn, just in time to see Kara Thrace break a pool-cue over the head of a beefy officer. His colleague took exception to this and tried to bring his own stick into play.

Lee however was quicker to move, grabbing a conveniently empty beer bottle from the nearby table and sending it flying at the attacker's head.

Chaos quickly followed, the two of them the calm eye at the center of it.

* * *

An hour later would find them in a cell the militia barracks, who had been called in to quell the fight.

An hour after that, they would be married.

* * *

Twelve hours later they would greet the new day, together.

"Good morning, wife," he would murmur into her neck, unexpected tears dripping from his eyes.

"Good morning, husband," she would reply, rolling herself about so she could see his face, opening herself to him again.

Yes, he'd reflect as he sank into her again. Yes, some things simply were inevitable.

Fin.


	5. Anatomical Sketch: Male Torso

_Here we go again. No porn!battle, just inspiration thanks to reviews. Don't own the characters and I'm not making money from this; I'm writing because I like it and this stuff comes a bit easier to me than analyzing housing data in the greater New York area. Please read and review and maybe I'll manage to produce another of these little 'portraits'_.

**

* * *

Portraits of a Marriage - Anatomical Sketch: Male Torso **

Kara Thrace was not, contra to reputation, really loose or a whore. If anything, her standards were higher in the air than Caprica's twin moons. The problem there was that there was literally no-one in all the Colonies who could measure up to them -- save one man who'd set them for her and who she would never, ever encounter again.

Sad and pathetic as this state of affairs was, she'd long ago accepted it as a given and so settled for what little comfort she could find in the world. She was a healthy enough young woman and had perfectly normal, perfectly natural needs like everyone else. And if that meant drinking herself stupid every third or fourth night and risking contracting who-knew-what-from-whoever-it-was, so be it.

At least she had her vivid memories of those glorious minutes last Solstice Eve to carry her through the rest of the time. Or so Kara had to tell herself repeatedly. It wasn't like she could call upon Lee Adama and offer a repeat performance; not that she wasn't frequently tempted to try, only to be stopped by the glaringly obvious impediments that immediately came to mind.

For one thing, he was so far out of her league - socially as well as professionally - that he was unlikely to even remember her. Her considerable efforts to get his attention over the years, including all but publicly propositioning him in every seminar they attended, hadn't made a dent in that cool exterior of his. He'd just take her oh-so-carefully chosen words and fire them back at her, answering her questions on the surface and make it clear she wasn't as funny as she thought.

This shouldn't have surprised her, especially if campus gossip were any indication of his actual tastes, Lee Adama reportedly preferring his women docile and submissive. The irony there being her own fantasies with him all involved her kneeling before him and his god-like body, an unworthy penitent, offering her meager charms and enduring whatever he might mete out before taking what was actually his by rights.

Some of what she envisioned was positively -- barbaric, and always left her ruining her bedsheets. She'd long since quit wearing anything to bed on the nights she stayed home; less laundry and easier access to her personal 'hot spots' that way.

It was also a complete switch from her normal m.o., given she preferred being on top in all things. Somehow, for some reason, this didn't bother her in the slightest.

* * *

Even allowing that he'd recall her face from the Academy, Kara further doubted he'd have connected it to Their Connecting – as she'd come to think of it – in the elevator that one night. She hadn't originally planned on being at Academy Administration that night; she'd just meant to drop off a modified lesson plan and take the night tube back to Delphi. Finding Lee Adama alone in that elevator had switched off her internal guidance system, her feet carrying her into the car on autopilot.

Kara wouldn't claim that she'd _planned_ on pulling the emergency switch, or that she was even really conscious of doing so, then all but jumping onto the man who'd somehow taken up residence in her head and heart. It wasn't until she felt his fingers entangle her hair, and his tongue flicking over her's, that the reality of it all hit her. Terrified that he'd come to his senses any second, she immediately set to work on his uniform, pulling wildly at it and mindlessly desperate for just a single touch of what lay beneath it. One touch and she could die happy.

Kara had become so frantic that it wasn't until Adama groaned aloud that she realized she was actually gripping _him_, the thing she'd dreamed such sordid things of for years. She watched in amazement as his head – the one on his shoulders – tilted back slightly, eyes slit-like and face the picture of bliss. Even more amazingly was how she felt his cock stiffen and harden to steel as she held it. Her mouth went dry and breath caught in her throat, hands trembling at the silk-like feel of his foreskin.

Adama's eyes snapped open as she leaned in, giving him a final almost-chaste kiss, then followed through with how she'd envisioned their joining would play out. She sank to her knees, and took him into her mouth, doing so with such surprising ease despite his incredible size and hardness.

Her hands weren't left idle during this, one committing the feel of his skin to memory, the other working to hold onto his equally impressive balls. Even when he urged her to take him deeper, his head nearly scraping the back of her throat, not for an instant did she slacken or gag or loose her grip on him.

The only shortcoming to the whole scene was that she hadn't had time to strip nude as she would have preferred. At least, that's what she thought...until Adama roared harshly and hauled her back to her feet. He applied a crushing grip to her arms and snarled "Not just me." Kara tried to divine his meaning, only for conscious thought to be short-circuited again when he brought their lips together, reclaiming her mouth and her breath and quite likely her very soul.

"You too, Thrace," he went on saying/growling/snarling. "Not just me. This is yours, too." Kara was too discombobulated by _that kiss _and his words to immediately realize he'd opened her pants. He spun her about so sharply she was left positively dizzy, and hauled her back against him, holding her in place with a single arm of solid steel. Not that Kara could have summoned the will to move away by then, certainly not when he'd pulled down her pants and panties and had himself positioned _exactly_ where she'd dreamed he'd be.

But then he paused and said -- something -- she couldn't hear past her own hammering heart. Raw and driving need caused her to forget her place as she moaned "Lee, I ne – need you --" That she'd used his given name was a shame that would come later. There and then, it was all she could do to reach back to him and haul him the rest of the way into her, his cock stretching her and piercing her and branding his mark upon her core.

They moved perfectly in time, in perfect synch, their respective needs met and the climax they shared -- literally beyond description. Kara could feel her spirit lift from her physical form as easily as Lee lifted her body from the floor.

And then it was over. Adama stumbled back and dropped to a crouch, leaving her to support herself against the wall. She didn't dare turn around and face -- whatever was there. She just didn't have the strength to face disappointment, or regret, or hate.

Gods, she'd just taken liberties, _uninvited_ liberties, with the one officer in the entire Colonial Fleet who she actually held a smidgen of respect for. If that didn't earn her an express ticket to Tartarus, what would? Kara couldn't stop the superstitious shudder that shook her from heels to crown at the thought. Better she absent herself from Adama's presence before her curse spill over onto _him_ as well.

Quickly righting her uniform, she hit the emergency button again and practically threw herself out of the car as soon as it reached the eighth floor. Only as the doors were closing did she dare glance behind her, meeting Lee's confused and vulnerable look there. Nausea bubbled up from her gut and sent her fleeing to the nearest head, where she hid for the next several hours.

* * *

She departed for Delphi that same night, returning to her closet of an office and stayed there for several days, alternated between sleeping on the floor and staring at the wall. Her brain refused to slow down the whole while.

Among other things that ate at her was that they hadn't used a condom, and her contraceptive implant was about a year from expiration. The prospect that she was pregnant was -- unsettling, the ghost of Socrata Thrace always hovering just over her shoulder. The fact the baby would be half-Adama was the only blessing she could envision out of it, never mind that the other half being her's made it seem more like a blasphemy.

It turned out to be a non-issue as her cycle started a few days afterwards. It was at once the most welcome – and heartbreaking – thing she'd ever felt. It meant there was no baby, and no baby meant no complications -- and no connection to Lee Adama.

She went back to her apartment, cleaned herself up, then went to the nearest bar she could find and proceeded to blank out her memories with as much alcohol as she could hold.

That was how it went for the next two hundred and fifty days: teach during the day, drink at night, either stumble home alone or into some else's car, suffer clear memories and even clearer fantasies in her sleep, suffer hangovers in the morning, get up and start the process all over again.

How and why she survived this routine eluded her. Not once did she dare think it because she still had a destiny to fulfill, or that it might include a certain fellow pilot.

* * *

Her superiors either were clueless about their jobs, unobservant about her behavior, or just didn't give a flying frak about her personally. Kara herself figured it was some combination of all three, especially given how under-equipped her office was and how her numerous requisition requests went unanswered. She didn't even have an ordinary telephone installed there, for god's sake.

Yet she managed to do her job with a modicum of professionalism. Sufficiently so, it seemed, that she caught the eye of some self-important brass-tack from the War College faculty. Said brass-tack decided, using a logic that Kara herself could not grasp, that her presence would be beneficial at an Advanced Tactics Symposium on Tauron. It seemed a perfect escape from the increasingly-claustrophobic atmosphere she felt on Caprica.

The Symposium, as it turned out, was a little more than a subdued beer party for a collection of brass-tacks and tactless brass, most of whom were probably there as an escape from their spouses, and their mostly-attractive 'aides'. Kara herself managed to beg out, claiming to be ill from the trip, sneaking away to a dive bar just around the corner from the hotel that waste of taxpayers' cubits was being held. It was a miserable-looking place full of too much smoke, too much noise, and plenty of aggressive (and well-sloshed) idiots she could beat at pool and triad.

Kara smoothly inserted herself into a pool match, winning a pocketful of script easily. She threw her second game, just took keep the other patron's interested and placated. Her third game however ended up with some slab of meat engineer summarily declaring her a cheat. She'd have happily left it be and just evac'd herself, if only the slab of meat didn't then declare she owed him _more_ than just cubits.

Kara Thrace might have been a lot of things, none of them good and still fewer worthwhile, but a whore was nowhere on that list. Nor was she a fool, and so used the first weapon that came to hand, in this case a pool cue that cracked in half and sent her attack down. There was movement behind her, but this was lost at the sound of a too-familiar-too-shocking voice calling out.

"Kara, get down." She instinctively ducked as a beer bottle was hurled across the room. It hit the figure behind her like a guided missile and sent him stumbling into a huddle of pyramid fans, who to a one took great exception to having their discussion of the Panther's chances at the Cup interrupted so. Bedlam was the inevitable result of such disruption, bodies and bottles and anything that wasn't nailed down soon sailing all over.

Kara kept her head down, crouching near the pool table, and was not a little shocked to find Lee Adama there with her. He reached out with considerable care and checked her head for any sign of injury. "You okay?" he asked.

"Uh-huh," she nodded, unable to verbalize more.

"Lets get you the frak outta here." He didn't wait for an acknowledgement, instead throwing an arm over her back and, keeping them both low, all but dragged her towards the door. They very nearly made it when the same beefy officer she'd brained earlier blocked their path. He reached down to grab her, bloodied face furious, when Adama abruptly stood and grabbed his outstretched arm. With smooth economy of motion, Lee swung their attacker aside, clearing their path of egress.

Before they could run the idiot made one last grab for her, only to have Lee Adama seemingly channel his call sign and drive a very, very solid fist into the fool's stomach. He'd put so much force into that punch, in fact, that it sent its target right through the already-broken window behind him and into the street outside.

There was the sound of falling bodies and breaking glass aplenty, but _this_ was apparently enough to silence them all, not to mention freeze the both of them in place, as shocked as the rest of the patrons.

A brace of local militia arrived just a minute later. When their captain demanded the parties responsible for the disturbance, three dozen fingers were pointed as one directly at herself and Lee.

* * *

The humiliation didn't end there, however. The station chief insisted on putting them in the drunk tank, even though neither of them were more than lightly buzzed and their Breathalyzers were well under the legal limit. On top of this, she made noises about charging them with "assault with intent", rather than a simple "drunk and disorderly". Apparently she dislike Fleet personnel, probably having had run-ins from the same bar.

Lee, who had a slightly better command of Modern Tauron than herself, took command of the situation and exchanged some very heated words (with several meaningful gestures in her direction) with the chief. It nevertheless had the desired effect of getting the chief to leave, but not before she directed a broad-shouldered, bearded detainee be brought into their cell.

"What the frak is going on," she whispered, wincing a little and trying not to sway from the adrenaline crash finally hitting her.

"I, um, told them --" Lee started to say, blushing.

The new arrival cleared his throat and addressed them. "Is this your intended?"

Kara winced again, as much from the decibel level of the burly man's decibel level as the thick scent of dark ambrosia flowing from him. "My -- who?"

The man coughed once, then again, and asked. "Your intended. The man you've pledged to." He snorted and sneezed, sounding as if he were on his last legs.

"My --" Kara couldn't quite bring herself to finish the sentence, instead slewing her eyes at the unsteady figure standing beside her. "What the frak did you tell them, Adama?"

"That, uh, I was defending your honor."

"My honor?" It was so unbearably sweet and chivalrous a sentiment, Kara had to literally fight not grab his ears and kiss him. Kara wouldn't claim to entirely understand Tauron mores, but she had a strangely sinking/exciting feeling she knew where this was going. She decided to test her theory, refocusing on the figure standing before them. "Sir? Which denomination are you?"

"Orthodox Church. Izztha' -- is that acceptable, child?"

Kara could only nod, eyes going wide as realization about exactly what Lee Adama had – knowingly or not – committed them to. It terrified her as nothing else, not even Momma at her worst, had ever done -- even as she felt her feet start to leave the ground, carried aloft by

"Do you have any special vows you wish to speak?" the drunken priest was asking, Lee looking increasingly shell-shocked and unable to answer. This left Kara to pick up the slack, as well as lean against her -- _fiancee_ -- to keep herself upright.

"No, the traditional vows will be fine." She cleared her throat. "We can start right now."

"Yes?"

"_Yes._"

Lee was looking between the two of them, eyes bouncing back and forth between them, clearly in too much mental distress to contribute anything.

"Very well," the priest nodded, then looked upwards and recited "We stand this night, in the sight of the Twelve Lords, to join in holiest union, their children -- um --" The priest blinked and looked back to the two of them with a frown. "Um -- who are you two again?"

She and Lee sighed in tandem, leaned into each other, and surrendered to the inevitable.

* * *

It was an insane end to an insane night.

And it was perfect. Just perfect. As if the Lords of Kobol themselves had dictated it would happen this way.

fin.


	6. Anatomical Sketch: Female Torso

_Here we go again. The usual disclaimers apply (the characters aren't mine, I'm not going to make any money here, please don't sue). Its take the better part of forever to get this finished, so I'm posting it as is 'cause I want to get back to my regular work. I hope you enjoy it and will review it. PLEASE review it 'cause I can use the encouragement at this point!_

* * *

**Portraits of a Marriage - Anatomical Sketch: Female Torso **

There would be a part of Lee Adama that would always disbelieve in the word "forever". His childhood, while by no means as terrible as his wife's, had taught him that people were unpredictable and that instability was the natural order of things. He compensated by exerting a careful control over his reactions to external events; this gave him an aura of decisiveness and competence he always felt was just skin-deep. Even joining the Fleet gave him only the most momentary respite, because the universe saw fit to ensure that Kara Thrace's path intersected with his.

Kara Thrace, who had wormed her way into his life and heart so deeply that the chaos and excitement she embodied seemed to take over. She'd drawn him into her orbit from the first moment their eyes had touched, and then sucked him in as surely as if she were a naked singularity. It was out of sheer self-preservation that he'd become hyper-vigilant of his surroundings and to observe _everything_ in his visual range; Lee knew he'd _never_ live down tripping over Connery in the mess hall and really wanted to avoid adding to the list of Kara Thrace-inspired mishaps.

Sadly, it seemed Thrace had some kind of built-in stealth package as he never actually realized it was _her_ in his vicinity until it was too late. It didn't matter if it was in the library, the student union, a lecture hall, or an otherwise empty runway; one second he was attending to his business, then he'd turn and find _her_ barely an arm's length away.

At that point, all his considerable attention became focused on her and her alone. Lee would find himself studying her form, her expression, the small tick of a smirk that she seemed to always wear, how she filled out her Cadet's Blues in ways that left nothing to the imagination; he committed _everything_ to memory. She never deigned to speak to him, her mere presence a challenge, one Lee never failed to fail at. He just _couldn't_ get his tongue to brain to work with her standing there. Her patience with him always proved minimal and she was gone by the time he could form the word "Hi."

The Advanced Tactics seminars were the worst, if only because each one was a missed opportunity to engage her directly. Again, whatever it was that allowed her to slip past his conscious awareness played him for the fool, leaving him to struggle to 'answer' her 'questions' each time. Their exchanges would become the stuff of legend down the road, which only further encouraged Lee's vigilance and led him to pick apart arguments and strategies gone stale. Not only did this give him a reputation for perceptiveness and tenacity, it also won him very few friends and still fewer admirers among his peers and superiors. It wouldn't be too great a stretch to say he was actively if lightly hated by the time he finished his coursework in War College (via e-correspondence while aboard _Eos_ no less).

There was a downside to this hyper-observation he practiced, to whit he had also gotten very good at reading people's 'tells' and mannerisms and seeing the thousand little lies everyone told everyone else on a daily basis. It helped him win at cards, but also eroded his ability to trust others, himself included. This might have explained why he routinely left the same pathetic, pleading message for Lieutenant Thrace on the Delphi switchboard: she was the _only_ one he couldn't 'read' so easily, and so was the only one he could potentially trust in all things and in all ways.

Well, that, plus the fact he couldn't get that little ride she gave him in the Academy's elevator out of his mind. Common sense dictated it would be the height of stupidity to let a woman who gave head like that get away without a fight. In his crazier moments, Lee felt prepared to hand in his wings and spend the rest of his life literally chained to her bed if that's what it took to keep her in his empty excuse of a life.

Fortunately such moments passed quickly and he contented himself with sounding like an obsessed, borderline-stalker over the phone lines. If she ever told him to frak off -- well, he wasn't really sure what he'd do then. That handful of minutes in the elevator, plus all the rest of their pseudo-encounters at the Academy before then had somehow come to constitute the defining relationship in his life. Lee wondered if he should feel worried about that, especially given his brother was a frequent caller and he'd managed to exchange a few civil words with his mother. He also wondered if it was even healthy to be so -- what was he exactly? Infatuated? Besottled?

Obsessed?

Hopelessly in love with a woman, who likely as not just considered him another notch in her already well marked bedpost?

Lee was starting to suspect there weren't words in any of the dialects spoken in the Twelve Colonies to account for what was going on with him. It was pathetic, utterly unworthy of the Adama name, and it was the state of his life for nearly a full planetary year.

* * *

How he endured it all -- well, that was easier to answer. He endured it because he didn't actually _live_ in it. The focal point of his day wasn't the flying or the briefings or even the latest triad game; it was those hours just before reveille, when his head disconnected from consciousness entirely and he was all _her's._ Lee could never remember the dreams in any detail, merely that _she_had visited them and it always left him harder than solid stone when he opened his eyes. He'd take care of that little problem before joining the rest of the world, usually just as the lights snapped back on in the bunkroom. If any of the squad wondered why he was changing his bedding twice as often as the rest of them, they made no comment.

This disconnection from the mundane everyday world wasn't without its problems. Lee estimated he expended no more than 15 percent of his time and energies meeting the responsibilities of his posting on the _Eos_, his rank of Captain, his station as DCAG, and his Active flight status. He even gave an extra five percent towards keeping issues among his pilots to a minimum, which surprisingly proved enough to keep things calm and the squad in line. Or perhaps they were all simply too scared of what he might do to them if they were to cross him.

The remaining eighty percent of his focus, time and energy was directed towards a certain flight instructor of dubious reputation back in Delphi. In the two hundred and thirty days it had taken him to pull his head – the one on his shoulders – back together where he could string a sentence together, Lee had conceived of a hundred different ways to approach said flight instructor. They ranged from sending her daily bouquets of flowers to hiring a singing telegram to purchasing season box seats to the Panthers in her name to going AWOL so he could break into her apartment and present himself to her _all natural_. He never summoned the nerve to actually put any of those ideas, never mind the even more impractical ones, into action.

Given he was putting so much attention and energy into this issue, his fellow pilots and officers were not blind to his distraction. Many knew of him by reputation, and therefore were not a little puzzled by his seeming reticence and disinterest in everything. The CAG, while having no argument with him over his official conduct, came to the sensible conclusion his Deputy needed some time away from the battlestar. To his eyes, young Captain Adama was working himself to the bone trying too hard to live up to a reputation that wasn't entirely his to begin with.

When the _Eos_put into skydock over Tauron, Major Antonio ordered Lee to take a three-day Liberty on-planet, making it abundantly clear Lee Adama was ordered to have _fun_ and not show his face anywhere near the _Eos_ for that time period. He didn't care if his subordinate got laid, splayed, played, engaged, enslaved, branded, burnt, or whatever might float his tightly moored boat; if he even tried to set foot aboard ship before that Liberty expired, the Major would personally lock him in the brig…and then call his mother.

The threat was hardly necessary. Lee truly was desperate for a change of scenery and had every intention of the longest bar-crawl he could manage, his sole objective being to drink himself sober and sane. If nothing else, it might afford him some respite from the confusion that gripped his soul so tightly.

He really shouldn't have been surprised that Kara Thrace would be at the very first dive he entered (so chosen precisely because it was a dive and thus the last place anyone would think to find him), or that the two of them ended up in the midst of a full-blooded brawl (for which they'd be quite unjustly blamed for), or that they'd finish the night up by being married in a jail cell (all because he'd wanted to spare them both the minimum embarrassment of needing to call the _Eos_ for legal counsel).

Evidently he hadn't been as attentive to Grandpa Joe's stories of his homeworld as he'd thought, otherwise he'd have known better than to claim Thrace as he had. Protecting the 'honor' of one's intended, while provincial, was apparently something the Tauronese still took seriously.

It was more the speed at which events played out than simple shock that had him going along with it all. After all, only a fool tries to stop a speeding train by hanging off its caboose; better to hang on for dear life and pray to the gods whoever's driving could apply the breaks at some point.

* * *

If Lee had been frightened by his lack of restraint in that elevator, he nothing short of horrified at the energy that was driving him by the time they found a hotel room. The things flashing through his mind between their release from the station to that moment, every fantasy that had sent him running for the closest hiding space he could find, had built his need for this woman to the point where nothing else mattered.

The door barely clicked shut behind them before he was all but shoving her onto the nearest available surface. The look on her face could have been one of shock or hunger. Lee couldn't tell as it only barely registered, all his awareness taken up with the overwhelming need to feel her skin under his fingers. And if he seemed a little too practiced at stripping her down, his hands were merely following the path he'd imaged so often in his mind and waking dreams; the fact his imaginings mirror the reality almost perfectly (she was a tad more responsive in the flesh than he was prepared for) was a side issue.

Kara's own hands weren't idle, although she was having greater difficulty getting around his own. The feel of her tugging and pulling at his belt cut through the fog of desperation he'd floated in. "G…gods," Lee heard himself groan, fighting to focus on the shinning eyes staring up at him. "Tell me…tell me…you…you want…" He couldn't read her expression, had no clue as to her thoughts, and was sure he was going to die on the spot if she issued the slightest sound of distress.

Instead, her hand snaked up and gripped him by the hair, while the other smoothly freeing him from his pants. Her voice resounded in his ears as his perceptions focused to crystal clarity on her open and guileless face. "I, Kara Artemis Thrace, do pledge myself to you."

Her grip on him tightened, both above and below, drawing him to her.

"Forsaking all others."

Lee felt all will drain from him as she positioned him at her most intimate opening.

"Until death do us _part!_"

She pulled him into her, surging upwards and throwing both legs around his hips. His own arms encircled her, holding her aloft and hold her as _tight _as she _held_ him inside her.

"So say we all," was all he could croak, throat tightening again. He was starting to shake, and not from the exertion needed to keep ahold of her, and so stumbled several steps to the left to deposit them both onto the bed.

Kara spasmed and cried the instant they landed, her inner walls squeezing him and overwhelming what little control he had left. Lee felt his eyes roll back into his head as he followed her into ecstasy, conscious thought fading as raw _need_ took over again.

Even so, Lee did not become some slavering animal, mindlessly devouring the body he held. He retained clarity of mind and thought, all of which focused on learning all he could of this woman…before she vanished from his life, very likely for good this time. Lee didn't dare let himself hope she harbored any genuine feelings for him, especially given this mess he'd roped them into.

Rather he concentrated on memorizing everything he could of her. Like how there were five spots on her upper torso that were especially sensitive. Like how brushing the underside of either breast would cause both nipples to stiffen.

And how the insides of both thighs were ticklish, and there was a patch of skin over her right knee that was some kind of erogenous zone.

And how he could plant a kiss to her palm or wrist, or run his tongue over her collarbone, and she would clench around him.

And how she would purr if he ran his palms along her sides in unison, or growl harshly if he favored one side over the other.

And a dozen other things besides. He would memorize the exact shape and proportions of the tattoo on her neck, so to look it up later, and would ponder for years to come why she had the words "public property" tattooed on her arm in Classic Virgonese.

The three layered pyramid on her shoulder would prompt him to investigate her background, suspecting (rightly) she had played the sport in her youth.

He would forever associate the scent of Leonese Mossberries with her, as that was the scent of the shampoo she used and which suffused her hair.

He could nip her earlobe and she'd stiffen and dig her fingernails into his flesh.

* * *

Throughout this, her hands and lips were no less active in their exploration and discovery.

Rarely would their eyes not be fixed on the other's, even in the midst of orgasm and rapture.

* * *

In time, they would sleep, hands and bodies entwined.

In time, they would wake to the new day…both not a little shocked the other was still there. He would call her "wife", and she would call him "husband". It sounded too normal, too natural to be _real_ between them, but neither would say this aloud, knowing even the gods themselves could not have made something so perfect.

His hands and lips would resume their exploration, while her's would seem to know where they were wanted. He envied her for that, knowing the rest of creation would envy _them_ for what they now were.

She tasted like _forever_, and for the first time in his life, Lee Adama found himself believing the word.

Fin.


	7. Abstract Sketch

_You know the drill: I don't own the principles or the concept behind them. This is being written for fun and not profit. Don't bother suing; my baby daughter has dibs on my paycheck from now until the Cylons return. This is the seventh such portrait I've made; its strictly sexy fun, so don't complain if you're offended by innuendo and dirty talk. Please read and review; don't be shy. The pilots certainly aren't._

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* * *

Portraits of a Marriage – Abstract Sketch**

Lee Adama's private vow to let things lie lasted a total of twenty hours after they'd parted company on Tauron, both of them feeling as if their insides were as thoroughly scrambled as their nominally personal lives now were. This rather foolish resolution had come about because he'd made the decidedly foolish mistake of asking if she wanted to contest or terminate the marriage. Oh, he felt a sizable section of his soul shrivel in the asking, but there it was. He certainly wasn't going to force this woman he loved into some sham 'marriage' if her heart wasn't in it.

"_The woman he loved."_ Shouldn't that have been a _little_ harder to accept?

The look she gave him at the spaceport could have frozen a newborn sun dead. "Try it," she stated calmly and clearly. "And I'll cut your cock off." The look in her eyes clearly communicated she would do _exactly_ that, right there in the lobby of a high-traffic port of call.

"Um, okay," was the best he could manage.

"You're mine, Adama. You pledged yourself to me in the sight of the gods. You try breaking that, I'll break _you_."

Lee fought for mental traction, wanting to get some positive sign from her in those last seconds they had. "So…you _want_ this?"

The sadistic bitch stepped into his personal space and 'accidentally' brushed the back of her hand across his groin, even as her other hand gripped his hair and brought their lips back together. "I want it, every moment I can have it," she whispered into his mouth. She pulled back and smirked. "I'll take the rest of you, too."

Lee was unable to formulate a response as she sauntered off. It was just as well he wasn't fully there, otherwise he might've wondered at why she quickly broke into a full sprint for the gate leading to her flight after just a dozen paces. Given her shuttle didn't depart for another hour, her haste would have seemed unusual.

As it was Lee couldn't manage more than to march himself to his own departure gate and take his shuttle back up to the _Eos, _his eyes downcast the entire time and his thoughts looping around a singular question.

_What the frak? What the frak? What the frak? What the frak?!?_

He had not the slightest clue what it was in reference to.

* * *

Returning to his regular duties provided some distraction enough from his brooding, though not enough to cut through it entirely. His CAG kept shooting exasperated looks his way during the first briefing of their patrol cruise out past Canceron, and made a point of pairing him with the worst eject of a rook for their first CAP. Doman Shuli, call sign "Proctor", wasn't so much incompetent as unseasoned, prone to over-compensating on his RCS and shortening his turns. Rook mistakes one and all, easily corrected but requiring vigilance on the part of the senior pilot to make sure they didn't compound into something worse.

Lee appreciated the chore more than he could say. Somewhere along the line he'd gone from asking himself _What the frak?!?_ to asking himself _How many frakking forms do I need to fill out now? _Six…seven actually…came immediately to mind…all of which would require documentation he _didn't_ have and which would entail at least four additional forms to requisition…

The fact the first bit of paperwork that came to mind was the FM-501A – _Declaration of Next-of-Kin – _very nearly had Lee flying his Viper into the side of the battlestar. He then mis-fired his own RCS a few seconds later at the realization that would mean procuring a Federal Certificate of Marriage…which would make this…this madness absolutely binding and legal in all twelve colonies…

Lee was feeling positively green by the time their CAP was done, his analytic mind having built an elaborate cats-cradle of forms, paperwork, questions, answers, fees, penalties, modified tax brackets, and fussy personal details he needed to attend to in the few off-hours ahead of him. It hounded him through the rest of his duty shift, right up to the closing briefing of the day with the CAG. _Frak!_ was all he could think during that time.

_Frak frak frak frak frak! _

How was he supposed to get all that done out there on a frakking battlestar? For all he knew, Kara had come to her senses and was drafting up divorce papers while he was riding herd over his eject of a wingman. He had to make this all legal and right and above board _before_ she ran off and found someone who could treat her right and proper and…

"Apollo," his CAG called to him, causing Lee to half-jump out of his chair. "You with us?"

"Yes, Sir." It was such a blatant and obvious lie no-one dared _dis_believe him. Or they wouldn't have, if his damn mouth hadn't kept running. "I was…just thinking…"

"Yes?"

"Well," Lee struggled, shuffling his mental triad cards and ultimately coming up with what he hoped was a winning hand. "Given we're already on patrol here, maybe a few exercises would be in order." Going by the thoughtful look the CAG was giving him, he'd come up with at least a four-on-a-run.

* * *

It turned out to be Full Colors, actually, when the CO decided his idea for full combat exercises was the way to keep the squadrons in shape. The 'jackpot' however was that Lee was stuck coming up with both the plans and the pairings for them, which meant his down-time went from minimal to completely nonexistent. Under normal circumstances, Lee might have even thanked them for giving him the assignment.

As it was, he was sorely tempted to throw his wings at them and hijack a Raptor to Caprica, the paranoid certainty Kara was going to end this…whatever _this_ actually was…at any second having taken hold. Even the absolute conviction with which she'd threatened him at the spaceport wasn't enough to dampen this fear. Ideally he'd thank her too for having the courage to undo his mistake when he himself was too cowardly to do so. Except if she were to actually do so Lee was sure he'd be responsible for the bloodiest murder-suicide in colonial history.

Gods, when had he become such a needy shit? It wasn't like he really _knew_ anything about her to begin with beyond how she was a damn fine pilot. Well, that and that she could turn any discussion into a sexual innuendo. And that she was a devout deist. And she could even speak a few lines of Classic Virgonese, quoting Kataris in his native tongue.

And she gave great head.

And she would roll her eyes 110 degrees counterclockwise when annoyed, and a full 180 when simply amused.

And that there was a sensitive spot on her lower back, right above her tail bone, which if kissed or licked with just enough pressure would send her exploding in orgasm.

In the hour he sat in the rec room and stewed, the list of things he knew about Kara Thrace was lengthened in ways he'd normally guard against, primarily because his traitorous body insisted on remembering – and responding to – mainly to the physical aspects of her. This mental list wasn't the only thing that had 'lengthened' dangerously during this time and it very nearly had Lee throwing his notebook and databinders across the room. Frustration wasn't something he handled well, especially given he couldn't _handle_ it in as he normally would have at that moment. There were enough "Arrow of Apollo" jokes circulating as it was.

The traditional avenues of relief temporarily closed to him, Lee recognized there was but one way he might deal with this issue. He might not be able to confront Kara directly, not with several hundred million metras of vacuum between them, but there was nothing stopping him from just calling her and telling her exactly what was on his mind. If she laughed at him…well, it would just confirm what a joke this all was and he'd have to learn to live with it. It was only when he'd reached the wall-phone that he realized he didn't know her home number. Ship-to-shore calls tended to be monitored, and his calling the Delphi local exchange asking for a phone number was sure to raise a question or two.

This didn't deter him in the slightest, the same need that drove him half-insane on Tauron burning through any and all possible objections. He'd just have to brazen it out and come up with some convincing little lie to cover this. Lee paused long enough to pat his pockets for a bit of scrap paper with which to take down the digits, ultimately finding a single, carefully folded slip of paper in his jacket's external pocket. He didn't immediately recall putting it there and began unfolding it as he cradled the receiver to his ear. _"Comms board_," a diffused voice spoke into his ear. Lee was about to speak when he finished opening the paper, mouth dropping open at the words that greeted him:

_My home number:_

_3484/7002/4519_

_Call me __anytime__. _

_--- Your Wife (!) Kara_

Lee could only stare at the carefully formed words for several long minutes, not entirely unaware a couple of the pilots also sitting there were casting worried looks at him. It slowly hit him that any hope he'd had of keeping this on the down-low was rapidly fading, unless he started taking action fast to cover it. He picked up the receiver again and requested a ship-to-shore line.

"_Call route?"_ was asked, and Lee carefully enunciated the 12 digits, requesting they be repeated back to him. There were no errors and the call went through. Lee's mind raced along with the carrier signal, which connected almost immediately and he suffered through a dull ache of a dial-tone, trying to come up with something to say if…when…the other end picked up.

"'_Lo?" _a familiar voice answered after an extra moment, the sounds of chewing amplified over the receiver. Lee found himself struck dumb, even as a familiar stiffness hit his lower regions. _"Hell-loo?" _was called again, a lifetime of annoyance and physical danger packed in those two syllables.

"Hey," Lee smiled, not caring how inane it sounded.

There was a beat of silence across the line. _"L...Lee?"_

"Yeah. I, uh, I found your note."

"_You…it's really you?"_

"Um, yeah." An unhappy thought hit him. "Are you…is this a bad time?"

"_Huh? What? No. No! No, no, no. It's… it's fine. I just…"_ There was the sound of movement and something being knocked over. A sincere whisper of _"Frak!"_ was heard. _"You, um, you still there?"_

"Last I looked," Lee smiled. "You okay?"

"_Well, I was eating dinner…"_

"I can call back."

"_No! No, no. Please. I don't…I'd like to…um…" _ She noisily cleared her throat. _"Sorry about…um…" _Her voice drifted off after that, leaving them both metaphorically adrift.

Lee did his best to fill the resulting silence. "Um, Kara?"

"_Yeah?"_

"I…I was thinking about…this…"

"_Yeah?"_ Was it his imagination or did she sound…nervous?

"I…um…we, uh, need to…to fill out a lot of paperwork if this…if we're going to make this…official." He squeezed his eyes shut and braced for a laugh. Or a screech. Or something.

What he wasn't prepared for was her very thoughtful answer of _"Um, I already started that."_

"You what?"

"_Look, Adama, I told you I take our vows seriously. If you don't want this…well, I hope you've got a frakking good lawyer."_

"No, I…I…" Lee found himself stumbling for words. "You're really okay with…well, with me and…this?"

There was another short chasm of silence between them. _"I want to try it, Adama. An' not just because you're such a good lay."_

"I'm not sure how I should take that."

"_I'm…I can't believe I just said that."_

"Somehow I can." Lee sighed and decided to take a different track. "So…what're you wearing?"

"_Huh? Oh. My dog tags."_

"And?" Lee prompted after another beat.

"_And what?"_

"And what else."

"_That's it."_

Lee could only wince at the image that superimposed itself over his consciousness. He immediately turned from the rest of the room and faced the wall, so no-one would notice the enormous bulge that appeared just under his beltline. "That's…all?"

A low chuckle, one that embodied every definition and vision of _sex _itself, was his only answer. "Gods, Kara," Lee could only hiss. "I'm standing in the frakking rec room here!"

Another throaty chuckle followed. _"So?"_ If it were possible, his erection felt like it hardened to the consistency of titanium.

"You are so lucky I'm out here, and not in that room with you right now." Lee said this with remarkable calm and composure, even if his face was a masque of barely-leashed fury.

"_Oh? Why's that?"_

"Because if I was," Lee managed to ground out through clenched teeth. "I'd make that night in the elevator look…tame."

He could almost hear the blood drain from her face, and likely start pooling in her most intimate areas in the process. _"Lee…"_

"I can't get you out of my damn mind, Thrace," he continued, all but hissing into the receiver. "I damn near crashed my Viper three times today because I'm thinking about you and us and everything we have to do to make this…and now you've got me imitating a damned tripod…"

"_I lied," _she abruptly declared, stopping his tirade cold. The rest of him followed suit as fury was replaced with purest anxiety.

"What?" He couldn't even summon the energy to brace against the coming rejection or 'I'm having second thoughts' or…

"_I'm wearing my running gear and an old hoodie." _It took Lee a few seconds to catch up.

"What's that got to do with…oh."

"_Um, I really did start on the, uh, the paperwork. The Marriage Certificate is gonna take another couple days, but I've also got a pile of forms…you know, tax forms and insurance and all that shit."_ She audibly swallowed. _"I'm…I'm sorry…about…y'know…"_

"Turning me into a human tripod?" he supplied with a smirk, conscious he was still doing a fair imitation of it.

"_Yeah. I mean, I…um…hold…hold on a second, 'kay?"_ There was the sound of a zipper being pulled and fabric sliding over skin. _"Sorry. Getting hot in here."_

"Uh-huh," Lee sighed, not fighting the image this time. He had a big enough headache as it was, and just allowing himself to envision his wife in nothing but half a track suit didn't make it quite as painful this time around. "You're really committed to this?"

"_I am. Don't ask me why, okay? Gods know you never…"_ He knew where she was going, having already been there himself. The words came easy with that realization.

"I did, Kara." He sighed. "I _always_ saw you. You just had a way of…slipping under my DRADIS, blindsiding me."

"_Really?"_

He could only wince at her skepticism, knowing it was justified. "Every time, Kara."

"_Even when I was…questioning you in those tactics seminars?"_

"Especially in those seminars," Lee had to chuckle. "You just have a way of…catching me off-guard. I couldn't think what to say or how to act around you." He sighed. "Pathetic, huh?"

"_Um…no. Its…wow."_

"Yeah, 'wow'." Lee took a deep breath, steadying himself. "I…I'm supposed to be preparing some exercises for my pilots."

"_Oh, right. Shit. Right. You're aboard ship. Um, when will you be back on Caprica?"_

"We're on patrol another ten weeks. We should put in around Equinox."

"_Come to my place when you can get here, okay?"_

"Okay," he heard himself agree readily. "I'll draft a letter giving you authority on this until we can see an attorney."

"_Fine. Um, will you…will you call me again?"_

"As soon as I can," Lee promised, mentally calculating what this one call was going to likely cost him. Ah, frak it. It wasn't like his savings weren't huge enough as it was. This emboldened him enough to add "One thing."

"_Yeah?"_

"Wear _just_ the dog tags."

"_Whu…um, now?"_

"Now." The silence that resulted left him wondering if he hadn't overstepped himself. Then came the sound of clothes sliding off a body that should have been cast and immortalized in marble, of it being dropped to the floor, making his throat tighten and his head – the one on his shoulders – to go light.

"_Can I…do…anything else tonight?" _his wife asked him in that same low voice that would have launched a thousand ships in ancient times.

"Only if you're thinking of me when you do it."

"_Ditto. Love you, husband."_

"Love you, wife." He replaced the receiver on the wall, slowly settling it back onto its cradle and taking several deep breaths. His body was slow in following his mental command of 'down boy!' and only the fact he was now alone in the room allowed him to stop facing the wall. So much for clearing his head…heads. Frak, that woman was going to kill him, even without being anywhere near him.

Worse, he still needed to develop those exercises and all he could think about was _her_. What the frak was it about that…that _woman_? He wondered if she caressed a joystick the same way she had him…was it just two days ago?

Somehow it wasn't hard to mentally transition from her riding him to riding a Viper. Heck, that immediately led to his recalling watching tapes of her training runs during War College. Yeah, she flew like she frakked, and gods help whoever he might hear - pilot or otherwise - who might voice similar thoughts. It was poetry the way she handled her bird, dipping and weaving through the standard formation. It was…

Pure inspiration.

He immediately sat down and was flipping through his binders and consulted various charts and diagrams, his right hand scribbling notes without any visual checks. Quick as his hands were, his mind was quicker still, envisioning a scenario that was so beyond the pale of SOP as to be considered..._insane._

* * *

Five weeks later, tapes of the "Buccaneer 01" exercise undertaken by the Starkiller, Luna, and Titan squadrons off the battlestar _Eos_ were circulated amongst the faculty of Fleet Academy and senior staff of the War College. They were immediately made required viewing at the former, and integrated into the curriculum of the latter.

When the officer credited with the scenario - considered amongst the most challenging at the time - was asked how he'd dreamed up something so intricate and executed it to near perfection, Captain Lee Adama had a simple, modest answer:

"A goddess inspired me."

* * *

Needless to say, the goddess in question had a few thoughts of her own to add, but that's another story entirely.

Fin.


	8. Still Life

_Do I really need to say it? The usual disclaimers apply. No real smut this time; I'd originally planned this piece to be the second part of this series, especially as it takes place immediately after 'First Canvas'. But then when do our plans ever follow through, eh? Hope you enjoy it._

**

* * *

**

Portrait of a Marriage: Still Life

"_This is the Commander. Moments ago, this ship was informed that a massive attack against our homewords is underway. Who, how, why doesn't really matter at this point. All that matters is that, as of this moment, this ship is at war."_

Starbuck had been started out of her post-coital nap at the Old Man's announcement, and was fully dressed by the time he'd finished. Frak frak frak frak! Everything just had to go wrong today, didn't it?

She finished fastening her pants and stomping her feet back her boots, then pulled door of her cell open, although she made no move to evacuate. There was no doubt in her mind the Old Man would be sending someone to fetch her out any minute, so there was no point in antagonizing the situation when she was still under charges. Not that it likely mattered, but she'd promised herself (and more importantly, her husband) that she'd at least try and keep things

Stinger and the rest of the Vigilante squadron were probably already engaging the Cylons – who else could it be? - but that left the _Galactica_ itself effectively defenseless. The ship needed pilots, especially given they'd dumped and detonated all of the on-board ordinance just yesterday. Kara started mentally reviewing available personnel, unable to hold back the wince that resulted. Dear gods, she was going into battle with a collection of rooks!

The Petty Officer who came to fetch her didn't seem surprised she was up and waiting; the fact she pulled her cell door open just as she stepped into the brig caused a momentary pause, but one he immediately recovered from. "Lieutenant, the Commander..."

"Wants me in CIC. I figured." She all but dashed past her and ran at a fair clip the rest of the way, not slowing until she was just a few steps from the CIC itself. Taking a few deep breaths to calm both her breathing and mind, Kara sauntered in, throwing a smirk towards Tigh. She'd have thrown more given the magnitude of the debt he owed for making her miss flying with Apollo, but there were more immediate things to attend to. The Old Man, for instance.

"Starbuck reporting for duty, Commander," she declared with a perfect salute.

Adama didn't look up as he said "Situation's bad, Starbuck. The Cylons have achieved complete strategic surprise. Last report is we've lost 30 battlestars."

"That's a quarter of the fleet," she observed superfluously.

"I'm putting you in command of the air group. I need pilots and need fighters in the air."

"Understood, Sir. Pilots we've got. There's at least twenty of us climbing the walls downstairs." Kara frowned hard. "Planes are another issue --"

"I seem to remember there's a full squadron in the starboard flight pod."

Leave it to her father-in-law to come up the solution. "We'll get cracking on it, sir." She saluted and began to spin away, only to stop herself. "Sir? Any word on Apollo?" She had to force the question out, but there it was.

The Commander just shook his head. "No word." She knew the man well enough to read the strain those two words put on him, and much as she might have wished to comfort him or ease some of that tension, she had nothing to offer. Even if she dared tell him about the marriage, and even if he actually believed her, all that would mean to him was that he was sending the last of his children into battle and certain death. Or, worse, he'd bar her from the air entirely.

Gods help them but that's where she was needed right now and nothing, _nothing_ could stop that.

* * *

She managed to get a full six hours in without thinking about the fact her husband was jetting around in a likely-unarmed Mark II, during what was shaping up to be the greatest massacre in recorded history. There was plenty to keep her occupied, between her pilots and the deck crew having to push the restored Mark IIs across the ship to the port-side deck, _then_ dust off all the old ordinance stored at the museum, _then_ her organizing this makeshift squadron into something into a semi-coherent unit that wouldn't immediately get their asses blown apart.

Still she couldn't help but wince at hearing Caprica City was now just a crater, or that Picon Fleet HQ was gone, or that _Galactica _was effectively the last battlestar. There wasn't any word about Delphi or Sparta, yet. Kara made it a point to keep her thoughts away from those considerations as well.

So she concentrated on what was in front of her: her bird, her pilots, and the battle to come.

* * *

Sadly, the last one proved to be a bit of a non-event. The Raiders were a different model from what she'd trained against, and damned if they didn't fly better. Not very imaginatively, thank the gods, and she couldn't begin to imagine how _cramped_ their pilots were in those things. Keeping them away from _Galactica_ was easier than it looked, the only complication being how the main body of Raiders were just a massive escort for the one carrying a nuke.

It burned her no end that the escorts had succeeded and that _Galactica _took one to her port side. Worse, it reminded her of the tapes she'd studied of "Buccaneer Oh-One", leaving her mildly offended on her husband's behalf that his brilliant strategy had been co-opted this way. They'd had to vent the forward sections of the flight pod to put out the fires. Starbuck hadn't been able to bring herself to count the number of bodies that ended up getting ejected; she could only pray the Chief had listened to her warning to get his people into their pressure gear.

They'd lost five birds and three pilots, which wasn't bad considering. The deck crew had it slightly worse, with twenty dead and another dozen unaccounted for. The _Galactica_ had jumped after the fires were out and so there hadn't been time to do a comprehensive search for survivors. Kara just felt numb at that point, the adrenaline crash just having started and her head feeling a tad light.

"Get the birds through turnaround, Chief," she heard her voice order, conscious thought slow to catch up to it. It was an obvious order and one Tyrol didn't argue. "How long?"

"Six hours, Ell-Tee." He sighed and shook his head. "Be longer if I'd let it slide about --"

"Don't go there, Chief." Kara huffed and came fully back to herself. "Let me get cleaned up and I'll get the rest of the squadron down here to help."

"I'll take every pair of hands."

Kara caught how Tyrol looked like he was about to say something else, only to stop mid-breath. "What?"

"Um --"

"Chief, c'mon. Out with it. I'm dead on my fe --"

"It's about Captain Adama."

"_What _about Captain Adama?" she prompted when he didn't continue. She didn't need this right now. She didn't have the energy to fence with the Chief or anybody over anything, least of all news about her husband.

"Its…they're saying he was shot down with the government's transport."

Kara stared at him, unmoving and unblinking, face set in expectation of further news. The Chief however had nothing further to add. "Any word about Sharon?" she asked, still not moving, sounding like she was reaching for something, anything, to say.

"Um, no."

"Frak," was all she could mutter. "Carry on, Chief. I'll get the squadron down to help, aye-sap."

"Yes, Ma'am." They exchanged salutes, Kara's a little crisper than his, then parted ways. Kara wasted no time in marching herself back to the senior pilots bunk room, making a bee-line to her locker. Pulling it open, she stripped off her flight suit with practiced efficiency, then dumped her sweat-soaked tanks and underwear as well and pulled on a fresh set. There was no time for a shower, so she'd have to make do.

The whole process took barely a minute, and she was about to close her locker again when she spied the photo she'd taped to her mirror. Herself and Zak Adama, taken just two years ago, on the eve of his Basic Qualifications Flight. Most of the rest of the squadron didn't know the full story behind the photo, just that she was an instructor at the Delphi Academy at the time and that Zak had been there. She half-listened to the rumors that circulated, stories of an illicit affair and her somehow contributing to the tragedy that surrounded Zak's name. Most of it was bullshit of course, but as with most rumors there as a kernel of truth to it.

Kara took a moment to unfold the picture, revealing the third figure there, the one who stood closer to her than Zak ever did and with whom she was holding hands.

Eyes fixed there, Kara quietly prayed. "Lords of Kobol, hear my prayer. Accept into your care the souls of your sons and daughters who have passed this day." Her breath hitched before she continued, voice hardening noticeably with her next words.

"And, if it wouldn't be too much trouble, please bring my husband back to me as soon as humanly possible. I need to kick his ass for scaring me like this."

She then closed her locker, pulled her flight suit back on and tied it off around her waist, and snapped her gunbelt back on. Picking up her helmet, Lieutenant Kara Thrace exited the bunkroom, resolved that she'd see the day through, no matter what might come.

* * *

Three hours later they were docked at Ragnar Anchorage, most of the deck crew aboard the station and pulling out every bullet and bomb they could. The Old Man was aboard there as well, overseeing the work personally, leaving Tigh to manage the ship. This worked for Kara as it kept the XO up in the CIC and out of her hair. Getting her pilots into the swing of repair and maintenance of their birds, getting their hands dirty in the guts of the planes themselves, wasn't nearly as hard as she feared. It kept them busy, but more importantly kept her too busy to think about --

"Hey," came a familiar voice, from above her. Kara felt her heart and breathing stop, that one word filling a void in her soul she consciously ignored until that moment. She had to bite her lip and blink away tears, the urge to push herself out from under her Viper and bury herself in that voice nearly taking over.

Instead, she coughed and growled "You're late."

There was no missing the smirk in his response of "Sorry. Had to rescue the President of the Colonies."

_That_ got her to slide out and stare up at her husband. "Adar's alive?"

Lee Adama stared down at her with shinning eyes, shaking his head. "No. Laura Roslin."

"Frak," Kara had to laugh, letting her head fall back to the deck floor. She didn't know whether she was going to laugh or scream. "We've got a school teacher for President now?"

"C'mere." It was said softly, without heat or force, all the more irresistible for it. Kara reached out and grabbed the hand he offered, letting him pull her to her feet.

"I heard you were dead," she stated quietly, eyes holding his, then added with a smirk "Didn't believe it for a second."

"Really?"

"Well, maybe for half a second."

"That long, huh?" Now it was his turn to smirk. "I was half-expecting you'd still be in hack."

"Only half, huh?"

"Hoping, actually," Lee confessed, even more quietly. Kara caught herself chuckling, trying to scowl hard and failing at it.

"Looks like you were wrong there."

"Everybody's got a skill," she drawled, quickly sobering and drawing back a pace. She didn't let his hand go, however. "Um, your dad is still aboard the station, last I heard."

"Yeah, I spoke with Tigh. Gods, what a piece of work."

"Cut him a break, Lee. You the CAG now?"

"Guess so, unless you want it."

"Nah. Not a big enough dipstick for the job." They shared another chuckle from that. "Frak, I can't believe I said that."

"I'd be worried if you weren't making dirty jokes." He sighed and looked over the flight deck. "Give me the two cubit version. What've we got here?"

"Seventeen pilots and eighteen Mark IIs."

Lee rubbed his jaw with his free hand. "Finish with your bird and give me a run-down in an hour. I need to know what kind of OOB we can offer."

"Roger that," she nodded.

Neither made a move to part, or to let go of the other. Kara felt her fingers lock in place, not out of anything simple or comprehensible as fear or possessiveness. It wasn't _that_ simple. Not with them.

Yet there they were: standing in the midst of Armageddon, holding hands as they prepared to fly back into that consuming fire. That was all it took, holding hands with her husband, to freeze that moment in her mind as everything perfect in her frakked-up excuse of a life, knowing he was thinking the exact same thing.

* * *

This was their single, untouchable moment, when the vows spoken three years earlier in a jail on Tauron became something holier than all the scripture ever written. Something even the gods themselves wouldn't dare seek to severe.

After this, the gods could take them both, or not at all.

* * *

Luckily for Hades and the rest of the pantheon, the two would survive. Destiny, after all, had first claim on them. But that, as the bards would say, is another story entirely.

Fin.


	9. Uncorrected Effort

_Do I need to repeat myself? No? Good. On with the hawt smut!_

**

* * *

**

Uncorrected Effort

Ten weeks and one day after they'd parted company, Lee Adama was standing in front of the door to his wife's apartment. He held an expensive bouquet in one hand, had his duffel strapped over his shoulder, wore and his heart on his sleeve -- and was prepared to drop his dignity _and_ clothes at her feet the instant she opened the door.

He also hoped to put into effect a not-at-all-subtle plan of his own, conceived entirely on imagination alone. Gods knew his imagination had gotten plenty of a workout since Tauron.

* * *

The ship-to-shore calls they managed every four days in the interim helped a little on that score, especially as circumstances had limited both duration and depth of the calls themselves. His already fertile imagination had picked up the slack from there, making his downtime a study in agonizing ecstasy.

Kara was nothing if not merciless in assisting there, never failing to somehow work the suggestion – never an absolute statement, merely the _suggestion_ – that she was wearing nothing but her dog-tags into their calls. Lee sometimes wished this repetition would somehow desensitize him to the image, if only so he didn't have to constantly face _away_ from everyone every time he talked to her. Sadly, the opposite was happening and he was hard as stone by the time she uttered three syllables. It didn't matter what she was saying, just her voice was enough.

Somehow, between the banter and innuendo and generalized sexual frustration, they'd somehow managed to agree on a few basic ground rules. First, they would keep this all on the down-low, making sure all the paperwork was filed properly but otherwise making no formal announcement until they figured out how to approach his family with the news. It went without saying he'd stay with her while planetside. They'd tell no lies, but neither would they volunteer anything.

Second, when he was planetside, they would set aside a couple hours every day to just chat and get used to each other. There wouldn't be any talk about the future for the time being; they needed to know each other better before going that route. Again, this went without saying.

Third, when they weren't chatting or finalizing the legal paperwork, they would frak like bunnies. Unless either of them didn't want to or they needed a rest, in which case the other would respect that. Lee had to wonder how long this last point would endure, and made the foolish error of muttering such while the line was still open_. _

"_Well, the other one could always take matters into their own -- hands,"_ was Kara's breezy and blithe-sounding answer.

"What?" Lee chuckled. "In front of the resting party?" Instead of answering, Kara's breathing got unexpectedly deeper and more rhythmic, leading Lee to croak "Kara, what are you doing?"

"_Right -- neh --"_ Her voice hitched, then panted. _"Now?"_

"Uhh --"

She was panting by that point. "_Taking -- neh -- matters -- into my -- own -- yeah -- two -- hands --"_

That call, their tenth since parting, ended almost immediately thereafter. Lee spent the remainder of that down-shift hiding in an unused storage closet on E deck, and the next several days silently cursing his wife as a sociopath, a sadist, a harpy, a Fury, and without question the single sexiest of all the god's creations.

* * *

His priorities shifted slightly after that incident. Not only did he have to get planetside asap and solidify their legal ties, he also had to figure a way to pay her back for those terribly unfair minutes of listening to her _attend_ to matters. Distance and unfamiliarity with the proverbial terrain involved however limited his strategic and tactical options. There were few things Lee hated more than flying blind, and Kara Thrace never failed to not only kill his mental avionics dead, but fog up his mental canopy to boot and leave him unsure about the position, speed, vector, and velocity of their relationship.

Just about the only decent thing Kara did in the handful of calls after that was _not_do a repeat of 'taking matters into her hands'. Or if she did, she kept it to herself; Lee always listened carefully for any sign of it, but caught nothing. The 'dog-tags only' suggestion was a given, but the rest of it was the typical sort of pleasantries one expected between a couple. She bemoaned her superiors and the unimaginative curriculum they foisted upon her; he made noises about his CAG and squadron and general direction of his career.

Normal, boring things that often left Lee half-wishing _he_ could 'take mattering into his own hand' on her. Such relief was denied him however, given the rec room was never deserted and there was no incentive to get himself tossed in the brig for indecent conduct.

He settled for letting his frustration build and build, promising himself Kara would feel its full force when they were together next.

* * *

Somewhere along the line had come the decision they'd have dinner at her place his first night planetside. Lee wasn't opposed really, having nearly exhausted his credits and savings with their many calls. Delphi wasn't know for its restaurants anyway and he was looking forward to sampling his wife's cooking. The fact he'd dreamed of the many creative uses he could put to every kitchen and cooking utensil known to man played no part in his eagerness.

Kara had offered no clue to her culinary skills. She rather simply related her home address and ensured Lee knew which transport routes to take to get there. Her only other advice was _"Oh, and don't bother packing much."_

"Why?"

"'_Cause I promise you won't be wearing much."_ Lee would have sworn he could hear her mentally add _Frakhead! _at the end there. He nevertheless took her to her word and promised to keep his personal wardrobe to a minimum. Then Kara dropped her final bombshell. _"Oh, and I'm, uh, gonna have a guest over."_

The question was past his lips before he could stop it. "Male or female?"

Kara clicked her tongue and answered _"Dunno -- yet. I'm still trying to decide, y'know?"_

"Uh-huh."

Maybe it was the cool tone he employed, or the fact it was clear the joke just wasn't that funny. Whatever the reason, Kara continued on in a rush, saying _"It's a student of mine. A good kid, Lee, but he's -- I think he could use some extra -- um --"_

"What, Kara? Encouragement?"

"_A reality check."_

"A -- reality check? What's -- I don't get it."

"_He's a good kid, Lee."_

"Yeah, you said that."

"_It's just -- I dunno how to -- what to do with him."_

"So _you_ need a reality check."

Lee winced and felt a bit of a heel at the sigh she heaved over the phone line. _"Put that way, yeah. Yeah, I guess I do." _She paused and asked _"You okay with that?"_

"Sure, just so long as he isn't going to _watch_." Lee felt a shudder of fear run through him when she didn't reply immediately. "Kara?" More silence. "Kara!?" There was the sound of movement on the other end and Lee braced himself for still more humiliation. Gods, when had he turned into such a masochist?

"_Sorry about that,"_ Kara's apologized breathlessly. _"Needed shut off the stove before dinner burned."_

"Really?"

"_Yeah, really."_ She easily read what was imagined in his silence, adding _"It's getting kinda -- hot -- in here, Lee. And as I'm sitting here in my dog-tags --"_

"Don't! Just -- don't, okay?" Now it was his turn to heave a sigh. "You make me crazy, you know that?"

"_So you've mentioned. 'Course its no picnic for me here." _Lee snorted. _"What? You think I like you flying out there, without me on your six and making sure you make it back to the barn? You think I enjoy jumping every time the phone rings, wondering if its going to be some polite asshole from Headquarters telling me you've -- you've -- frak!"_

Lee was stunned by this sudden, emotive exhale, sufficiently so to where he had to struggle to speak. "Kara --"

Now it was her turn to quickly cut him off. _"I -- look, Lee. I'll see you in a few days, okay? Just don't get -- don't get yourself killed or anything, okay?"_

"Okay," he croaked. "I promise. Kara, last thing?"

"_What?"_

"I love you."

Two breaths, both heaving and hard, were her only response to this before the connection was cut. Lee himself was frozen in place, his wife's non-reply registering only distantly. The rest of him, conscious and unconscious mind alike was consumed with the realization of what he'd just said to her.

He'd said it. _The Word_. The one word that made it all -- made it all --

Made it all something he couldn't begin to describe. Made it something that caused him to spend the next forty-plus ship hours grinning like a fool, resulting in a lot of worried looks cast his way and less than epic round of triad being thrown early when none of his fellow pilots could read his 'tells' properly.

He'd said the word that made it _real_.

The fact Kara hadn't returned the favor didn't bother him, or even really penetrate.

* * *

Sixty hours later, a hardcopy transmittal was received by the comms board, addressed to "Captain Leland J. Adama – EYES ONLY". The mistake of his rank went unremarked upon when the sheet of paper was handed to him by a Petty Officer who looked entirely too young for his uniform. The message itself was unsigned, the point of origin simply given as "Sparta Base – Caprica" and consisted of just one line of text:

_You said it! No take-backs!_

When asked if there was any reply to send, Apollo simply shook his head. "None necessary."

* * *

The squadron and crew were well and truly scared when Lee spent another forty hours after that grinning from ear to ear. The deck crew even started a small pool betting on exactly how many more days it would be before Apollo snapped and did something terminal.

Nothing happened, of course, which simply scared everyone worse. It was no exaggeration to say the entire crew breathed a collective sigh of relief when the battlestar put into skydock over Caprica, and that no less than the CO himself authorized Apollo for a week's shore leave. He accepted the directive calmly and without argument, leaving the ship on the first available Raptor heading for Delphi.

* * *

The sight of Kara Thrace in civvies – polo shirt, jeans, and barefoot – was enough to make Lee momentarily forget himself and his plans. He just stood and stared.

"Um, hi?" Her voice was as shy and tentative as her smile.

"Um, hi," he echoed, then shook himself and thrust his hand holding the flowers towards her. "For you. Hope, uh, you're not allergic -- or something." This elicited a smirk that pained his heart in ways he normally didn't think about as too distracting.

"Thanks," she said, sounding a little more steady now, taking the flowers and turning to lead him into her private domain. The apartment itself looked like a storage site that had been converted into a loft. Not surprising given the the building itself looked at least a century old, it had likely been a gut re-hab at some point if the haphazard interior was any indication. It wasn't in a fashionable part of town, not that a middle-market 'burb like Delphi had a fashionable part, and generally looked like the sort of place the lower social rungs hung out.

As he followed her down the steps leading into the apartment itself, Lee said "Nice place."

"It's a rat nest," Kara corrected him bluntly. "But the rent is okay."

Not knowing what to say, Lee hummed a subdued "Um." He immediately started calculating how much of his monthly salary he could spare to get Kara out there and somewhere more worthy, not noticing until he'd reached the bottom of the stairs how Kara was giving him a hungry once-over. "Um," he hummed again.

"I got a surprise for you," she grinned.

"Um, okay?"

"Be nice," Kara warned, then raised her voice demanding "The sauce finished yet?"

"Yeah. I just turned down the heat," responded another voice from further back. A voice Lee immediately recognized and paled at.

Zak Adama turned a corner, presumably coming out of the kitchen, and walked towards them. His eyes sparkled at catching sight of Lee, extending a hand even as he wrapped a possessive arm around Kara's middle. "Hey, brother. No stealing my girl again, okay?"

"_Your_ girl?" Lee growled, automatically taking the hand offered, eyes flickering between the pair before him.

"_Brother?!?_"Kara snarled, eyes likewise moving between the siblings. "Hands off, runt," she ordered, quickly shaking loose of Zak's grip and taking half-a-step back. She looked between the two men before her a couple more seconds, then shook her head. "I don't see it."

Lee grit his teeth, mentally tallying the number of humiliations he'd just suffered and whether removing appendages from them both would be adequate recompense. "Zak here takes after our dad's side of the family. I'm more of a -- a throwback to my -- our mom's side."

This recitation that sounded a little too practiced for Kara's taste, the term 'throwback' especially. She promised to get the full run-down on it later however; she'd happily beat it out of Zak with a titanium pipe if that's what it took. She owed him big time for this little complication he'd just brought on. But that was for later. Kara recognized she had to smooth things out right there with her husband.

Glaring at Zak, she ordered "Go start setting the plates out, willya?" The younger man was smart enough to beat a quick retreat. She may have been his instructor for the whole of a week and a half, but he'd learned his lessons well concerning her mood. If only, Kara sighed, the same could have been said about his command of avionics.

Shaking her head clear of such thoughts, Kara turned back to her husband, who was now watching her with a kind of bland interest that had her guts turn cold. "_His_ girl?"

Kara swallowed, instinctively knowing her next words would make or break their marriage, never mind their entire connection to one another. She went with her gut and held up her hands. "Nothing happened between us, Lee. I swear to the gods. Nothing happened."

Lee however didn't look very convinced. "Uh-huh?"

"I thought he was your cousin," she finally hissed, confessing her stupidity in total.

"My -- cousin?" Her heart actually fluttered at how he rapid-blinked at this, face becoming positively adorable in confused outrage. She even nearly laughed.

"You never looked up my official biography, did you?" he asked her, which only worsened the pressure of laughter within her. It was clear he was starting to feel something similar, given his lips were pressed into a tight, thin line that was anything but stable.

Kara shook her head. "Nope," she squeaked.

"This is -- isn't --" Lee began, only to gasp for breath. "This isn't funny."

"Yes, it is." Kara felt tears start to pool in her eyes at the effort it was taking to speak coherently. In another second the dam would break and she'd be a hysterical basket case because this was all too ridiculous and she couldn't even start to make it right for them --

All hilarity left her, left them, when Zak's voice waffled from the kitchen a moment later. "Hey, where're the ladle?"

It sobered them both as quickly as if they'd been dropped – stark naked and from a thousand feet up – into the Arctic Lakes of Tauron. Both were breathing hard, deep cleansing breaths that seemed to bleed any humor from them. Lee turned hard eyes upon Kara and asked again "_His_ girl?"

"Don't -- don't start," Kara warned with an upraised finger, her own expression darkening. "Nothing ever happened between us."

"Nothing, huh?" Lee had to fight the instinctive step backwards her answering glare elicited.

"_Nothing_." She huffed and closed her eyes. "You may be an only child before we're done tonight," was her final growl, more to herself than him.

All Lee could do was trail behind her and quietly muse "This is going to be fun."

* * *

Dinner was actually a decent time for all. Partially that was thanks to everyone steering clear of any subject that might have sounded too personal. There was also Zak having more wine than was his wont, and thus quickly rendering himself incapacitated. Before that however he'd noted how their mother had been getting phone calls from their Primer Academy. They'd been searching for Lee, apparently out of interest of his time as a debate team leader there. Kara's interest perked up a little at this.

"Debate team leader, huh?"

Lee tried to brush it off with a dismissive "Wasn't anything much."

"You – you shoulda heard him, back inna day," Zak slurred, blinking to focus on his wineglass. "He ha -- had a hundred ways ta fix the worlds tha' actually made sense."

Kara discretely moved his glass out of reach as she cradled her chin on hand and focused on Lee. "A hundred ways, huh?"

Seeing she wasn't going to let this one go, Lee tried to explain it off saying "I just always thought we needed more, uh, civic involvement in the government. Make it more -- more responsive to the electorate."

"What?" Kara chuckled. "You're in favor of Mandatory Service?" The idea of Academy students having to work for a time in some public-service program as part of their graduating degree wasn't anything new. It was in fact one of the more frequent bugaboos media personalities and wannbe Tom Zareks tossed out when trying to score cheap points against the federal government, even if experience with various pilot programs did point to positive benefits from it. She shouldn't have been surprised that Lee Adama, son of a genuine legend of the fleet, would be in favor of it.

She was shocked when he shook his head and laughed. "No, not really. Making it mandatory makes it just another job people have to do. No passion behind it then, 'specially when you aren't getting paid." He finished his second glass of wine and continued. "I'm just more in favor of making it more -- more attractive to people."

Kara frowned, needing to think that one over. "So you'd prefer the government take over all service sectors?"

"I think the government could do a lot more than it is right now," Lee nodded, picking up Zak's glass and taking a sip from it. "For example, they could make it illegal for beautiful pilots in the fleet to have to live in a rat's nest." At this, they both stopped and stared at their respective glasses. "I -- can't believe I just said that," Lee said.

"Um," was Kara's reply, eyes casting about for something, _anything_ mundane to fill the silence that threatened. No small irony her gaze immediately fell on the now-unconscious third member of their little party. Nodding towards Zak, she suggested "Let's get him to the couch, okay?"

"Yeah," Lee agreed readily. "Good idea." Moving as one, they both took up an arm around their shoulders and slowly, laboriously, moved the unconscious man from the table and across the floor.

It might have been a good idea, but Zak Adama was no lightweight, and their mutual sense of balance was more than a little off. There was a good bit of swaying, stumbling and cursing involved in moving him a mere ten metras – all of which were largely free of obstacles of any size or shape – to the couch in the sitting area. Ultimately they succeeded, although both were well winded at that point, plus which they'd basically just dropped Zak into an equally haphazard heap into the sofa and didn't spare him a second glance. Had they done so, they would have seen him promptly roll off the cushion to land face-down on the floor. Both would later agree it was a fitting enough place for him.

That chore done, the two were left to stare at one another.

"So --"

"So --"

They giggled a bit at the echo, the momentary tension between them easing a hair. Kara turned away first, heading to the cabinet near the dinner table. "Whiskey shots?" she asked with another giggle, albeit a less stable one this time. She suspected she'd need some serious liquid courage now that their main distraction was incapacitated.

Lee followed her at a slower pace, mainly because he was fighting several increasingly-powerful urges simultaneously and needed a moment to clear his head. Kara had retrieved a bottle out of the cabinet and was laying out shot glasses by the time he slid up behind her. Reaching around her, he placed a hand gently over hers as she was undoing the cap, stopping her fiddling. "I think we've had enough," he murmured to her, voice as faux-gentle as his touch. The gentleness was a lie, and they both knew it. She must have at least sensed it given how she momentarily stiffened against him, his fingers tracing the ring on the finger of her left hand.

"Speak for yourself," she drawled with a smile, only to have it die when he plucked the bottle from her hand and threw it across the room. The only sound that resulted from this were the bottle breaking against the concrete wall, followed by a vague groan from beyond the couch. Neither of them so much as flinched at either noise. Kara wondered if she should have felt upset or scared at this reaction. Instead all she felt was a sort of serene calm, as if they were playing out their gods-ordained roles which would protect them from all things.

Aloud, she said "I've got a bottle of ambrosia gold here, if you'd prefer." Lee said nothing, his fingers continuing to play over her ring on her finger, and a stormy expression played over his dim-lit features. He looked ready to either explode or break down into tears; Kara wasn't sure how she'd respond to either contingency and wasn't prepared to wait to find out.

Instead she leaned forward so their foreheads grazed and asked "Talk to me?"

"You -- you don't want to hear what -- what's in my head." His voice shook and croaked with strain.

"I want to hear what my husband is thinking," Kara replied evenly, although she wasn't entirely sure she did.

"Part of me wants to --"

"Yes?"

Lee threw a glance towards where his brother lay snoring. "Part of me wants to stomp his damned head through the floor."

"Good luck with that," Kara chuckled. "The floor and walls are solid concrete."

"I also want to -- to -- frak!"

"Well, that I can manage." Kara brought her hands up and started undoing the buttons to his shirt, only to have Lee bat them away, doing so with a good bit of force.

"Kara? Touch me an' I don't think I'll be able to control myself."

"Maybe I don't _want_ you to control yourself." Lee looked up sharply, meeting her open and honest eyes. Gods help him she actually sounded like she meant it. Just the vague possibility of it made him hard, even as his throat started to constrict.

"Kara --"

Kara took this gasp of a plea to heart and leaned in again, brushing their lips together. "I dream about you every night," she breathed into his ear. "I dream about that ride in the elevator." The smile on her lips matched the one in her voice. "C'mon, Lee. I double dog dare ya to do it bet --"

Lee silenced her by pulling their lips together once more. Their tongues dueled, with Lee being the clear aggressor now. Kara was immediately awash in a swirl of sensations, from the painful grip he hand on her hair to the rough brush of his tongue across her teeth clean down to the sharp tugging on her shirt. He let go of her hair after a couple moments struggle with the polo shirt she wore, and Kara began to raise her arms with the expectation he was about divest her of the garment. Needless to say, she was caught completely by surprise when he gripped the collar instead and pulled in opposite directions. The cotton weave tore apart like damp paper, revealing the ample flesh underneath it. Kara felt herself flush at the realization she hadn't been wearing a bra, although this small embarrassment was quickly washed away as Lee's strong fingers made work of both breasts, his palming and raking and lightly slapping of each leaving her too light-headed to do more than sit there and allow him his liberties.

Too quickly however he moved his hands to other territory, pulling the torn shirt from her and tossing it away, then hoisted her up and deposited her on the dinner table. Kara tried to wrap her legs around his hips, only to have him apply a punishing grip to her thighs, keeping them were they were. Before she fully realized it, he'd undone her jeans and was tugging them off her, doing so with such speed and force it jerked her hips forward and caused the rest of her to tumble back on her back. No sooner had he pulled her free of her clothes – her panties included – than he was hauling her back to her feet and pressing her against the cold wall behind them.

Kara, despite being now fully nude, felt anything but cold with Lee pressed up against her. One hand pinned her wrists over her head, while the other danced a complex ballad amongst her nether curls. Her nipples and breasts brushed and mashed against his flannel shirt, the rough material a match to the equally rough chin that was scratching her chin and cheeks as he reclaimed her mouth once more. The whole scene likely would have looked brutal, even criminal to an outsider.

For Kara, it was beyond anything her fertile imagination had managed to tease her with, her body afire as never before.

And she wanted _more_, and wasn't above begging for it. "Lee --" she moaned around his mouth.

"Shut. Up!" Lee ground out, abruptly spinning her around and sandwiching her between himself and the wall. Having her nipples and breasts and cheek thighs pushed into the concrete should have been agony. Rather with him pressing even tighter to her back, hands reaching around and palms cupping and tugging on her breasts, his erection a solid weight through his pants, all these things converted the slightest brush against her skin by the air or wall or _him_ into a sensual caress that sent her spiraling ever further from herself.

She might well have fainted away but for Lee's ruthless voice keeping her tethered to him and his rough use of her body. "Mine," he growled constantly into her ears, into her skin, into her very soul. "You're mine – _not_ his! _Never_ _his_! Never let you go. Never! You're mine and nobody else touches you! Never touch you like this! Never never never _never!_" As if to emphasize the point he took a hard grip to her nipples, impossibly making them harder still.

Somewhere she found her voice again. Even though her eyes had fluttered shut and her other senses awashed in ecstasy, Kara knew full well what was coming. Knew it, welcomed it, and even sought to invoke it. "Yours," she affirmed in a small, almost weak-sounding voice. Lee grunted, possibly in acknowledgement. It was impossible to tell by that point.

"Take what's yours," Kara bade him, panting and at the end of her own restraint. "Take what's yours -- take what's yours -- take what's yours --" It became her mantra, her own claim to him, this man who touched her with such ease and knowledge and abandon.

This same man who pulled her from the wall and sent her carelessly stumbling to lean over the dinner table. By rights she should have been outraged by such treatment, if only she didn't relish it so, knowing as the gods ordained truth there was no malice in his soul towards her. She _invited_ this storm, willingly, so it would cleanse them both with its momentary and beautiful fury.

Such were Kara Thrace's thoughts as she braced her elbows and forearms on the table, spreading her legs and bowing her head so it rested on the table. She nearly wept at the sound of a zipper coming undone and heavy clothes sliding to the floor. How many nights had she tried to envision this scene, now made a real thing? Doubts somehow crept in, ecstasy and rapture cracking slightly at the insane speed with which her thoughts barrel rolled between certainty and fear. Was she actually _there_? Was Lee truly _her's_? Why didn't he _take_ was already _his_? What more could she say or do or offer or --

Time and thought and all things stopped as her opening was suddenly filled by a length so delicious and thick as to be a sin. Lee's damp skin was pressing tight to her own, his arms encircling her and holding her to him. Kara felt herself being raised to have to stand on tip-toes to keep him inside her, her inner walls nestling him as tightly as his arms did her.

"_Mine!_" was all he could growl, voice trembling and tight.

"_Yours!_" was all she could affirm, body and mind precariously balanced over an abyss.

It took but two more thrusts into her to send her tumbling into it. Or perhaps it was a hundred more. Quality and quantity were interchangeable at that point. Kara was momentarily lost as her a true body _exploding _orgasm hit, leaving her helpless even as Lee continued to drive into her, burying himself into her depths. Seconds later came another orgasm, then a third. She was so drained by the succession never mind the strength of each it was impossible for her to even moan through each. Just as well as she was more inclined to have screamed.

Yet moan she did when her husband exploded within her just seconds later, causing her to arch upwards, her strength momentarily restored. Enough to where she could wrap her own arms about his. It was all she could manage as they both slid onto the table before them. He didn't slip out of her immediately, his length still firm and filling. Kara would reflect on how amazing that was, but later, when she could speak such things aloud.

Instead, she pushed herself upright, moaning again as he pulled out from her. Kara smiled tiredly at her husband's incredulous and fearful look. "Kah -- Kara?" he hissed, something akin to fear there. What the frak did he have to be afraid of? Besides, that is, the very real possibility she'd chain him to her bed from now until they died in the throes of passion?

She simply shook her head and mouthed "Bed." Taking his hands in her's, she led them both, naked and exhausted, across the apartment to her simple bedroom. It took only a gentle push to make him collapse onto the mattress. Had she been of sounder mind, Kara would have taken an extra moment to appreciate the unadorned view of his strong back and firm backside. As it was, she simply crawled in to lie down behind him, wrapping her arm loosely around his chest and nose buried into his neck.

There was a distant thought of the person lying on the floor in the front room. But Kara couldn't summon the energy to care about that any longer. All that mattered anymore was that her husband was here, with her, and they were together.

The gods could take everything else in the worlds, but this was _her's_ alone.

That happy thought would be her last for many, many hours, her eyes closing and spirit floating free amid dreams made real.

Fin.


	10. Corrected Effort

_Another blast from the past. Enjoy, review, enjoy so more._

**

* * *

**

Corrected Effort

Kara felt a stab of panic zip through her at the feeling of the stone-hard form crushing her as she awoke. A single breath, filling her with a familiar and desired scent, and all panic left her. She tried not to feel bad or irritated at her reaction; this was, after all, only the third time she'd awoken with her husband beside her. Still, given the _intimately _familiar he was with her form, surely it shouldn't have been _too_ great a surprise for herself.

Plus which none of her previous bedmates, the tiny handful she tolerated staying around afterwards, actually managed to remain hard _and_inside her after the usually-brief festivities. That included that hag-bitch Captain Estelle Tommrah and her 'infamous' strap-on. Kara would readily admit the circumstances of her inviting the hag-bitch into her bed – and what happened afterwards – were vague to the point of non-existent. It had apparently been sufficient to send the other party scurrying off soon after dawn, something well nigh unheard of, as was the Captain purportedly going out of her way to avoid her from there on.

Kara didn't think much of her supposedly custom-made 'Battlestar' either. But then nothing – including getting fisted by some convict-turned-Marine – really succeeded in _filling_ her the way her preferred partner did.

Speaking of whom, Kara's awaking apparently had him rethinking the very _delicious_ stuff he was in the process of doing to her. She supposed he was just gentlemanly and silly like that, probably thinking it was impolite to be sliding deep into her while she was still dreaming about the previous night. Damned if she was going to just lie there and let him pull out before finishing her off again.

Reaching around with her free arm (the other was pillowing her head, and anyway their angle was all wrong to engage it), Kara planted her nails into the meat of his ass and growled "If you don't frakking finish me, _husband_, I won't be responsible for my actions."

A solid torso pressed down upon her back, powerful hands snaking around her and laying claim to her breasts, shifting them both so she was on her knees and open to him, her shoulders on the mattress itself and arms stretched before her. A honeyed voice poured liquid fire into her ear. "You asked for it, _wife_."

"Frakking righhhhh --!"

What came next, she could only blame herself for.

His non-too-urgent thrusts robbed her speech, his balls slapping her erect and exposed clit destroyed her coherence, and his low groans wiped away any sense of decorum or restraint. Her toes literally curled as the first orgasm shuddered through her. It almost _hurt,_the exertion needed to ride through it. Certainly her eyes rolled upwards and left her momentarily blind. Kara had no time to prepare for the second one that shot through her as his thrusts continued, the same maddening easy, un-urgent pace drawing this one out as well. Her inner walls squeezed him, trying desperately to draw him _deeper_ and failing to reach a satisfactory depth.

But Lee wouldn't let her be. "Like -- ngh -- like _this?_" was his panted demand. A single palm slapped on her ass cheek, shocking her as thoroughly as if he'd connected an FTL to her and turned on the juice. "Answer me!"

Her tongue couldn't form the words, her best effort being a slur of "Yeh -- gods -- godsssss --!"

"Frak -- yes!" was his answering groan/snarl/growl/plea/pant/claim.

But one further thrust into her, her inner muscles clenching and holding him tight, and they exploded as one. Neither had the breath to so much as groan, the power of their shared release leaving them both breathless -- and soon, senseless as well, consciousness proving impossible to hold onto after that.

Neither tried, content instead to collapse together, their bodies entwined and souls intermingled.

* * *

The smell of bacon and spices were what woke Kara next. Lee was still dead to the world and, sadly, completely flaccid. She sighed in mild disappointment, having to remind herself that while he did a fair imitation of his call-sign, Lee Adama was merely mortal and needed his rest. It took some doing to manage slid out from under him, mainly because he'd been doing his level best to keep ahold of her even while unconscious. It was both sweet and annoying and likely something she'd be contending with the rest of their lives.

That thought brought her momentarily short. Did she really _want_ to spend the rest of her life managing Lee's clearly-volcanic temper with wild sex on her furniture, wake up with that stick-bowl bat of his _inside_ her, and having him cling to her like a life-preserver the rest of the time?

Kara Thrace weighed these questions while looking at her husband's criminally beautiful face relaxed in sleep, his trim hair mussed up and sticking out in many directions, and his perfect body laid out bare before her. She felt a stab of pure hatred for the man, this man who had so brazenly and casually laid claim to her soul. How dare he lie there like that and make it utterly _impossible_ to pull free of him! How _dare _he!

She'd never cursed him, aloud anyway, so vehemently as that very moment. Not even when he'd seemingly snubbed her at the Academy while they 'discussed' the merits of a combined squadron raid on an enemy's planetside facility.

"_It's my contention, Mr. Adama, that Squadron One has more than enough thrust to allow for double penetration of the objective's coverage. Squadron's Two and Three can easily satisfy the key requirement of suppression relief for Squadron One to reach completion in the exercise!"_

Everyone and their brother knew she had really been trying to sound him out on the prospect of a threeway. Having had her well-crafted 'suggestions' thrown back in her face a dozen times already, Starbuck had logically concluded the only way Lee Adama would deign to let her into his rack was if she brought him a little something juicy and sweet and submissive as a bribe, because gods knew her own assets weren't anywhere near adequate to get his attention.

Everyone knew what she was doing -- _except _her intended target, that is.

"_What I don't see, Mr. Thrace, is why you insist additional Viper squadrons need to be engaged in the first place. There will already be teams on the ground and they can deal tasked with any anti-aircraft screen the base could muster."_

She'd actually gotten a few offers herself out of that exchange, all of which she declined because Kara Thrace wasn't _that_loose. At least, she wasn't while sober and harboring a glimmer of hope she could get under the invincible Adama armor. Accomplishing that little miracle had somehow become a defining goal of her's. Lee graduating shortly thereafter temporarily put paid to those hopes and Kara found herself drifting through the ranks until her own graduation.

According to rumor, Apollo himself got over a dozen offers, likewise all refused. Apparently he'd been saving himself because just a little over a year later he was driving her into the wall of an elevator and basically ruining the very concept of casual sex for her. Getting speared _and_satisfied by a literal god made everything else seem positively sordid and pale in comparison. The fact he _gave_ as much as he _got_ from her didn't hurt either.

And now, that they were married, with paperwork on file and a ring on her finger? She was strongly tempted to just climb back into her -- _their_ -- bed and do some serious clinging herself.

The sound of a mug or something falling and breaking shook Kara back to the present. "Frak," she muttered, quietly padding to the closet and pulling out a robe. "Zak."

* * *

Her suspicions proved accurate when she walked into the kitchen. It was indeed her brother-in-law, awake and bleary-eyed, puttering around. The smell of over-brewed coffee and eggs covered in Librian spices was nearly enough to knock her over. Kara felt the temptation to return to bed and just let the runt burn the place down. She was about to turn around and do exactly that when Zak looked over and saw her. "Morning," he said a little too loudly; Kara couldn't help but wince, nova-hot sex with her husband apparently not being the magical hangover cure she'd hoped for.

"Good morning," she said in a more measured voice. "Can I ask what you're still doing here?"

"Making breakfast." He said it with such casual cheer that Kara immediately envisioned bloody murder.

She closed her eyes and counted to ten. "I repeat: _what_are you still doing _here_, as in _still in my house_?"

Zak shut off the stove and used a spatula to scrape the eggs he'd been working onto a plate. He sighed and answered "I wanted to make sure you were okay."

"Okay?"

"Yeah. With Lee." He poured her a mug of coffee and added "Sorry about, um, last night."

"What about last night?" Kara felt sure she was missing something. She took a sip of the coffee, appreciating for the first time just how godsawful this Caprican brand was. It helped focus past the buzzing headache and (more pleasant) buzzing body parts.

"My getting drunk like that. I, uh, well --"

"Again, what?" Kara promised herself that if the runt didn't get to the point in the next breath, she'd toss him out of the apartment, via the nearest available window. He was costing her serious time with Lee and that, to her mind, was the sin of sins. "C'mon, Zak, spit it out already."

"I don't normally -- leave -- I mean, I hope you didn't hurt him."

"Hurt who?" She blinked and tried slipping a square peg into a hexagonal-shaped hole. "Lee? Why would I hurt him?"

"Well, he seemed to be coming on kinda -- kinda strong." Kara set her mug down and dry-washed her face with both hands, then looked Zak over again. She might've found him almost looked adorable, shuffling his feet and looking insecure like that. Except he was fast pissing her off more than amusing her, drawing things out like this. Her headache wasn't going away and his going overboard with the spices wasn't helping any.

"Yeah, he did," she heard herself agreeing quietly, only to realize a second too late he heard her.

"What?"

"What? Nothing." She tried to sound casual about it, which merely peaked Zak's interest more.

"Kara, you're married," he stated pointedly. Her brain was still shifting gears, not making connections with what the runt was saying and implying.

If she'd been even marginally quicker, she wouldn't have therefore answered with a dismissive "Yeah. So?"

"I thought you took this stuff seriously."

There was something in his voice that had her bristling, distracting her further than she already was. "What _stuff_?"

"Your vows, for one thing."

"I do -- I mean, yeah. I do take 'em seriously." Kara frowned, trying hard to figure Zak's angle, but coming up empty. "What's that got to do with anything?" The way he was staring at her, eyes narrowed and lips thinning, caused her to instinctively gather her robe tighter around herself.

This small action drew an equally small sound out of Zak, something between a gasp and a growl. "That -- that _frakker_!" he was spitting with his next breath, rushing past her. Maybe she was mildly psychic, but the instant his arm brushed her shoulder, she _got it_. All of it. Everything he'd been trying to say and failing as miserably as he missed his traps on the field.

"Zak! Zak, wait!" she called hurrying after him, nearly panicking that he'd reached the bedroom ahead of her. Thankfully she managed to grab his arm before he could jump upon Lee's still-reclining form. "Zak, its not --"

"The frak it isn't!" he hissed, shaking loose of her, doing so a mite too sharply and his elbow catching her in the eye.

"Oww," was Kara's only exclamation, and a muttered one at that. It brought Zak up short and gave her an opening to grab his arm again with every intention of hauling him out of the bedroom -- and drop kick him out the window.

This otherwise excellent plan was derailed by her husband shooting awake at the sound of distress. "What the --?" was he only utterance before seeing his wife wrestling with his brother. After that he saw only red, and was up and pulling them apart before another breath could be uttered. He had Zak pressed up against the wall with an arm against his throat in an instant. Gods alone knew where it might have escalated from there had Kara not forcefully inserted herself between them.

"Get the frak off him, Lee! Back off, now!"

Had it been anyone else he would have simply shoved them aside. But then, anyone else wouldn't have known that twisting his ear and grabbing his elbow in tandem would somehow short-circuit his voluntary nervous system and induce a nasty spasm in his lower back. This in turn effectively propelled him _away _from Zak in the most exquisite agony this side of a stroke-inducing orgasm, sending him tumbling back onto the bed. "Argh!" was the whole of his rebuke towards his clearly pissed-off wife as she kept herself between him and Zak.

"Cut it out, _both_ of you, before I cut both your cocks off!" With her trademark snarl firmly in place, there was no doubt on either side she'd go ahead with this threat.

Lee was unfortunately fixated on the darkening patch on her cheek, and so didn't fully realize the danger before him. He was fully ready to go at his brother again, and Zak clearly tensing to do the same, when Kara turned and shoved the younger man back again. "Back it off, runt!" she growled dangerously, then turned and addressed Lee. "He thinks I'm cheating on my husband."

This managed to penetrate Lee's rage after a few seconds, with him going from teeth-clenching fury to rapid-blinking befuddlement. He was convinced he'd misheard her. She just couldn't have said --

"Whu -- what?"

Kara was careful to enunciate each word. "Your _brother_ here _thinks_ I've been _cheating_ on _my husband_."

"Cheating? With -- me?"

"With you," Kara nodded, her own fury clearly melting away into borderline hilarity. When Lee's continued confusion prompted him to point to himself, just to absolutely sure he wasn't missing something, Kara took a short step forward and poked a very sharp finger into his sternum.

"Ow."

"Oh, shut up, you wuss." They were both grinning now, her's widening when she glanced down. Lee had to consciously resist the urge to close his legs when she said "Put some shorts on. I'm gonna go set him straight." She turned away quickly, lest their shared urge to lean together for an overdue good morning kiss overtake them. Zak was still barely a half-dozen steps away, and Kara really didn't want to end up giving him a show.

Rather she grabbed Zak by the arm and marched back to the front room, pushing him ahead of her and towards the sofa they'd dumped him onto the previous night. "Sit down," she ordered. "And listen close."

"Okay --"

"Did I say you could speak? No? Then shut the frak up and listen, runt." Kara knew she was running her mouth rapid fire, that it was a sign of how nervous she was, but didn't frankly care. She was even a smidgen grateful to the boy for giving her such an easy target upon which to focus. Not that he wasn't about to get his ears boxed for stupidity.

"I'm going to say this just once, so it had better penetrate that skull of yours, Adama. 'Cause if I have to repeat _ever_ myself about this, I promise you all sorts of pain. Am I understood?" Zak nodded, wisely keeping his mouth firmly closed. "Okay, here it goes." Kara however needed an extra breath before continuing, thoughts now racing to come up with a nice, neutral way of explaining this madness in a way that wouldn't send the runt running off to his father.

"Put, um, simply -- I can't cheat with Lee."

Zak nodded, then blinked. Then blinked again. "Um, you're gonna have to explain that one, Kara --"

"First, I didn't say you could speak." The snarl was back in full force.

"Um --"

"And its 'Lieutenant Thrace' to you, nugget."

"Yes, ma'am," Zak snapped, only partially in petulance. Kara merely sighed and shook her head, sitting herself on the low table before him.

"I -- I didn't mean it like that --"

"Oh, yes, you did," Zak countered her. He consciously keeping his eyes _above_ her neckline so to avoid the show she was unintentionally providing. With a sigh he added "And you're right. I'm, uh, a little adrift here --"

"Tell me about it," Kara groused to herself, glancing down and noticing for the first time how far her robe had opened. "Shit!" she hissed, quickly closing it and re-tying the belt. Eyes still downcast, she said "Look, Zak. I'm _not_ cheating on my husband."

"So -- you _didn't_ sleep with Lee?"

"Um, yes. I mean -- no. Yes. Ugh!" Kara raked her fingers through her hair and thought about offering a prayer for Zeus to strike her dead right there. "I mean -- I mean -- argh! I don't know what the frak I mean!"

"Hey, it's a simple question, Lieutenant." Kara looked up sharply at Zak's surprisingly gentle tone. "You're saying you didn't cheat with my brother, ergo, you _didn't_ sleep with him. Am I right?"

"'Ergo'?" Kara spluttered. "'Ergo'? Since when do you start using eight-cubit words like 'ergo'?"

"C'mon," Zak shrugged, hands spread open. "Am I right?"

The laugh that bubbled up from her stomach held no mockery to it, although objectively the boy's cluelessness deserved it. "Right. You're absolutely right." She sobered for a moment, realizing how he'd managed to complicate things all the worse by this little exercise if bullshit deduction. "Except for the small fact I did sleep with your brother." She grinned. "And we frakked."

Zak looked like he was honestly, seriously trying to make sense of her words. "Okay, you're gonna need to explain this to me." Kara nodded, willing to let him talk his way through this. "You're saying you didn't cheat on your marriage, right?"

"Right."

"But you're also saying you and Lee -- um --"

"Frakked. You can say it, you know."

"That you and Lee _slept_ together." Kara restrained herself from offering either commentary, correction, or elaboration on this point. Instead of all that, she just nodded. This apparently only worsened Zak's confusion. "Um, I -- I really don't get it."

She stared at him, mouth hanging slightly agape. Surely he was playing with her here. "What don't you get?"

"You're saying you haven't cheated on you marriage, but that you slept with Lee."

"Right."

"So -- I just -- I just don't --"

"You -- you're serious."

"Yeah."

"You really -- you really don't get it." Zak shook his head helplessly. Kara rubbed her temples, trying to grasp the humor that had made all this seem funny a minute ago. Tried to, and failed completely.

"Lee!" she shouted in frustration.

"Yeah?" her husband sauntered out of bedroom, now clad in a fresh pair of boxers and undershirt. Kara cast a surreptitious glance towards the dinning room table, noting the pile of discarded clothes still littering the floor there. He'd probably gotten the fresh underthings from his bag, which irritated her mightily as it hid things that were _hers_ from easy sight, which in turn suddenly had her mouth watering for the same and was making it very dangerous for certain people in the room.

With a mighty effort, Kara tramped down that hunger and managed to ground out "Are you _sure_ you two are related?" She even threw in a dramatic gesture towards Zak, just to underline her feelings there.

"Why? What's he done now?" There was a still-dangerous undercurrent in the words that nearly had her trying to explain. That, or she would have rushed him, pulled those boxers down, and given physical demonstration of her adaptive technique.

Zak, thankfully, saved her the trouble. "She's saying -- she's saying she slept with you, but that she didn't also cheat on her husband. Its -- it -- I don't get it, Lee."

Now it was Lee's turn to sigh. "No, of course you don't."

"What?!" Zak threw his hands up in surrender. "Will one of you just tell me already?"

"Zak --" Instead of continuing, Lee simply walked over and took Kara's hand in his.

Maybe it was the simplicity of the gesture, or how they gazed at one another, or the simply seeing the two of them together in the same space. Whatever the reason, Zak suddenly _got it_, the realization sending him tumbling back. Mentally, at least. Physically, all he could do was sink lower into the sofa and mutter "Oh, frak. You're kidding."

"Nope," husband and wife answered in the same breath.

"You're frakking kidding me," he continued to mutter, although not to his brother and Kara -- _his sister-in-law_, his internal avionics quickly (and suspiciously easily) course corrected. Oh, frak! He'd just spent the night, on the floor of _his sister-in-law's_ apartment, while _his brother _and_ sister-in-law_ were _frakking_ in the next room! His instructor _was his sister-in-law!_

He'd spent the last eighteen days _hitting on his sister-in-law!_

Lee was going to frakking kill him when he found out -- if he didn't know already. Surely that little set-to in the bedroom wasn't because he'd clipped Kara on the cheek, right? Zak rubbed his still-sore neck.

"Look, Zak?" his brother addressed him, still standing there, holding hands with his wife. "You're the only one who knows right now --"

"Not the _only_ one," Kara corrected him with an overt nudge to the shoulder.

"Okay. Besides our lawyer and a few cops on Tauron --"

Kara nudged him again. "Don't forget the priest."

"C'mon," Lee snorted in exchange. "Do you think he even remembers?"

"Maybe not, but it's his name on the Federal see-of-em." Lee gave a rude sound and Zak shook his head, wondering who this -- this stranger was standing before him.

"Can I just ask --"

"What?" The pair again spoke in tandem, and they all nearly giggled aloud from it. The pair sat down on the coffee table, their attention soon taken up with each other to the exclusion of all else again.

"Um, when and how?" Zak pressed out quickly.

"Ten weeks and --" Lee started.

With Kara finishing "And six days ago."

Lee glanced at her. "Exactly?"

"Well it will be, as of 1840 Hours."

"You worked it out exactly?"

"I've had a lot of time to think on it." She leaned closer and stage whispered "When I wasn't _taking matters into my own hands_, that is."

"Kara --" Lee growled, some dangerous kind of context passing between them. Zak wasn't sure what it was or entailed, but instinctively knew he _didn't_ want to know.

Instead he loudly asked "How? I mean, how did you two -- um --"

"Meet? Hook up? Get hitched?" Kara supplied for him.

"Um, yeah."

Kara exchanged a strangely shy glance with Lee and asked "Where should we start?"

"How about when you made me trip over Al Connely in mess hall."

"I didn't _make _you trip, Apollo," she returned tartly. "Wasn't my fault you couldn't take your eyes off me."

"Fair enough. Where do _you_ want to start?"

"How about when you got a hard-on in front of me and four other female cadets in the elevator at Maura Hall?"

"When -- wait, you _saw_ that?"

"Nope. You turned away too fast and didn't give a sign. We couldn't see a thing." She smiled saucily. "But thanks for con_firm_ing it now."

Lee groaned, and Zak hid his face on both hands, her emphasis on the second syllable having the desired affect. For Lee, Kara's laughter was music and was easily worth all the embarrassment invoked to that point. Zak, although he would go to his grave denying it, felt the same and dearly wished he could sneak out of the apartment and forget the last forty-eight planetary hours.

Sometimes the gods were merciful and might grant such wishes. But not for him, not that day, and in time he'd thank them for it.

After all, it wasn't every day a mere mortal was in the presence of true and blessed love.

**Fin.**


	11. Couple, Rendered in Gouache

_Another porn!battle, another portrait, still more hawk!pilot!xex!! More notations at the end._

**

* * *

Couple, Rendered in Gouache**

Later – after they'd put in their time on the floor and danced to countless tunes, after they'd politely applauded their new Vice President and firmly turned away his 'offer' – the couple retired to the room the husband had rented for the night. He didn't turn on the lights, and she said nothing as he stepped to stand flush against her back. Rather, the wife reached behind her with one hand, cupping and stroking him to the desired consistency, while she began undoing the fastening at her neck.

This was their game now, one a little safer (and easier on the clothes) than the one they'd depended on in the past. She could still drive him more than half out of his mind with but a glance, while his presence alone could drive her to near-distraction. They yelled and hammered at one another in public, fooling everyone into thinking it was a simple matter of repressed desire between them. Nothing was ever that simple between them.

Nothing, except moments like this.

He stood still while she stroked him and stripped herself for him. It was a test for himself and for her. One he was slowly getting better at enduring.

His restraint broke at the first sight of her uncovered shoulders was what did it this time. The first sight of her creamy skin, shinning there in the dim light like a beacon, and he was snatching her wrists in a tight grip, pulling those talented fingers from their work as he pushed her forward. Her dress fell away and pooled around her feet, causing her to stumble slightly when her husband pressed her against the wall.

She'd known from the first how this day would go, and had taken the appropriate steps, forgoing underwear entirely. She would have preferred to have worn panties at least, thereby indulging in her secret joy of feeling him tear them off, but there was the practical issue of having only so many pairs left. Plus which none of them matched the dress --

Such thoughts were lost as his hands laid claim to her breasts and worried the sensitive flesh, rolling and working and scratching them, working her into a frenzy. She was no masochist, but he could – and did – leave all manner of marks upon her that should have had her declaring vendetta and removing body parts. Instead she returned the favor, giving equal measure, all the while longing for the day when it would be them and them alone.

Her husband worked her skin and played her nerves like a master musician. He used his fingertips and carefully trimmed fingernails to set fire to her nerves and brush all the right spots. She clenched both hands into fists and pressed them against the wall, letting him adjust her stance and tipping her at an appropriate angle. _"Stay still,"_ was hissed into her ear, followed by the unmistakable sounds of clothing opening and being discarded.

Listening to this, without realizing it, she brought a hand down to stroke herself. No sooner did her finger brush her curls than a very solid palm impacted on her exposed ass. This was no love tap, and the sharp pain of it zipped from the site of impact directly into her core. She trembled as she came, shocked and off-balance.

Strong arm encircled her, pulling her upright and flush with his now-bare skin. One arm pinned her arms to her side while the other snaked upwards, a hand encircling her neck, his breath thundering in her ear. _"I said 'stay still'!"_

Her whimper was her apology, her reward for it was to be propelled to the waiting bed. She quickly spun herself about, laying herself out for her husband's measured gaze. Her one act of defiance was to bring her foot up, resting her stiletto heel on his chest. There was no mistaking the invitation, one her husband readily accepted, pulling the shoe off and giving her toes a surprisingly gentle and all the more sensuous nibble. The other shoe was quickly discarded as well, the toes ignored in favor of spreading her thighs wide.

She looked up, seeing him clearly in the darkness, thick and erect and ready as ever. _"Mine," _was her whispered claim, equal parts wonder and wanting.

_"Yours,"_ her husband confirmed, advancing the final few paces and slipping into her as perfectly a Viper into a launch tube.

_"Gods!"_ was their shared sigh, their joining as smooth and overwhelming as their first.

* * *

They left the lights off, neither needing common sight to see the other's ecstasy, sharing in it equally and feeding off the other's holy rapture.

Not once did they call out each other's names, or indeed issue the smallest sounds beyond their shared breath, that alone bespeaking things that even the gods dared not eavesdrop on.

* * *

The Colonial Day celebrations continued outside, heedless and unaware, and not a fraction as sacred as the celebration shared in that room.

**fin.**

_

* * *

For those interested, 'gouache' is a type of paint consisting of pigment suspended in water, with a higher ratio of pigment to water than normal watercolors. I'm honestly not sure if its an appropriate medium for this particular portrait, but it sounds nice doesn't it?  
_


	12. Study in Red

_The usual spiel. Thanks to the Porn!Battle crew for getting me off my arse to write some more. Enjoy._

_**

* * *

Study in Red.**  
_

Lee had been avoiding her since that mess with the Guardian's basestar, making sure they were never alone in the same room at the same time. Kara had put up with this for ten days, her patience at end by the eleventh, and her plan of attack ready by the twelfth. The last was simple: as soon as she laid eyes on him, she'd pull Lee into the nearest closet space, dog the hatch behind them, and proceed to frak him until he actually _talked _to her. Or they died of exhaustion and starvation, whichever came first (so to speak). She'd done enough reading to know it was theoretically possible to frak someone to death.

It was either do all that _or_ she'd end up shooting him somewhere non-terminal, and she doubted she was up to taking over _Pegasus_ if it came to that.

The plan crystallized while she showered that morning, only to have her aforementioned husband wreck it by appearing out of thin air and grab her arms as she exited the head. He pressed her against the wall, lips mashing into hers and his sandpaper chin certain to leave scars along hers. It had been awhile, but not so long that the feel of his hands and lips on her didn't undo whatever resistance she might have mounted.

Her towel vanished and his knee was between her thighs, pressing upwards with clear intent. Kara was sure the fabric was soaked completely through after just a few seconds; she didn't 'squirt', but damned if this Alpha Male crap didn't leave her wetter than ever.

She groaned into his mouth as his hands ran up and down her arms, shoulders, back, sides, ultimately resting on her ass. He kneaded her cheeks, digging his nails in as if clinging to her. It was a familiar sensation for her, one she'd long missed and which had her clinging to him as well.

Less familiar was how he suddenly pulled completely away, wrapped both hands around her left arm and _threw_ her across the room. Too shocked to control her trajectory, Kara landed on their bed in a confused heap. Lee was there before she could gather herself, pulling her about so she was on her hands and knees and facing away from him. There was the sound of a zipper being undone, and she instantly realized what was happening and what was coming. She could even see why Lee was clearly bent on taking it to its logical, absurd end.

He evidentially had forgotten that while he was the superior strategist, she was the better tactician, ready to adapt to any line of attack he might mount. Plus which he'd never really gotten just how frakking _desperate_ she was, had _always_ been, for him. Even now, in the depths of his madness, she'd take him however she could.

Hence her widening her stance and using both hands to open herself to him. She relaxed as much as possible, but even so his entry into her was…brutal, eliciting a moan that was equal parts pain and joy. And that was just the first thrust. The ones that followed were no less forceful. At least he settled for his usual entrance; the way he was, she wouldn't have been surprised if he'd chosen her ass this time. They hadn't experimented that much and past experiences there had been…unpleasant.

Ugly scenes flashed in her mind, memories from those years before Tauron, when she'd traded her body so easily. But it was different now, Lee's presence alone making it so, his cock driving into her enough to mute the shame of those memories. She met him thrust for thrust, taking him as deep as she could, then squeezing a hair more depth out of it. Her reward was hearing Lee's own groan and feel his shudder; a fair exchange for the small pains he caused.

His breathing quickly began hitched, a telltale sign he'd reached his peak. No surprise she'd reached her own the same instant, and Kara quickly reached around behind her, grabbing his shaking arms and wrapping them around her. She wouldn't let him go. She'd let him get too far away as is, and in a moment of revelation resolved to reverse that course. Hence her enduring something that normally would have had her promising murder.

The choked cry from her husband, his control broken and fury spent, made it worth it. He emptied himself deep into her, even as she very nearly lost her grip on Lee's arms. He might well have escaped her, and that thought alone was enough to have her rallying. Having the buttons of his jacket biting into her back helping focus her past her own mind-blowing, ear-popping, eye-rolling orgasm, fresh anger at his shifting behind her quickly clearing her head.

Kara pulled away, digging her nails into his arm so he'd have a time if he tried the same. She growled as she did because he hadn't really softened yet, and him pulling _out_ of her wasn't her favorite sensation. This displeasure was quickly directed onto the nearly-recovered Lee himself. She bunched up the fabric of his jacket in both hands and threw _him_ onto the bed. Straddling his hips, Kara let go of his jacket and instead grabbed fistfuls of his hair and gave him a hard shake.

"Talk to me!" she ground out, noticing only then the tears leaking from his eyes. _Oh frakking perfect,_ she thought as her own breath started to hitch. _The one thing in all creation sure to make me break down into tears myself._ "Damn you, Lee…"

"I…"

"Talk to me!"

"I…I…_killed_ you…"

"Lee…"

"I ordered…you…"

"Gods, Lee!" Kara felt a burn of shame, realizing how she should have seen this one coming. _Of course_ he'd think this way, _of course_ he'd drive himself nuts with guilt that wasn't his to begin with, _of course_ he'd try to drive her off like this. As if attacking her would do anything other than make her dig in and fight back, harder.

Looking down at him, she saw the tremor in his lower lip, and how his eyes drifted shut under her withering stare. "I'll…I'll call security." Kara didn't need to ask what he meant; the gallows tone of the words said enough. He apparently expected her to agree with his proposed professional suicide, to move off him and let him call the dogs down on himself.

They'd been married for five years now and he _still_ didn't get it. She sighed again. _Of course he doesn't get it. You never told him._ It had been a deliberate oversight, an omission to protect…protect who? Herself? Him? Both of them? Frak, hadn't they already seen each other at their worst? How could something so long ago, so distant, so _irrelevant_ still hang between them without even being known?

Kara shifted slightly, suddenly remembering she was nude and he wasn't. Thankfully his pants and shorts were still down around his ankles, and better still, he was slow as ever in deflating. She scooted herself back a span, then sat down atop _him_ again. The feel of his partial erection against her cunt was enough to get her wet again, and she could feel _him_ start to harden to the proper consistency again.

Infinitely more gratifying however was his low growl of pain and pleasure. His eyes snapped open and met hers dead-on. There was anger there, that fire that ever flickered and licked in his gaze on her, leading Kara to silently rejoice. None of this could be heard in the low, deadly voice with which she said "You don't get away that easy, Adama."

"I just…"

"You just what? _Raped_ me?" Lee flinched at her hitting the mark so easily. Kara swallowed, but refused to falter. "I've been…raped…before, Lee. I know the difference."

He was staring at her now, those fire-eyes dimming slightly. "What?"

"I'm not going to repeat myself," she informed him, instead reaching behind her and taking his scrotum in her hand, giving it a gentle-if-deliberate squeeze. "But I know _this_ wasn't rape. It was my husband acting like a frakking idiot. Again!" This word was accompanied by another squeeze, one just slightly harder and longer this time, eliciting a pained wince from Lee.

"Kara…" he breathed as she released him, cradling his balls in her hand for a moment before leaning over him. She put both hands on his shoulders and fixed him with a look that dared him to turn away.

"You're my husband. You're my commanding officer. You're going to give orders that put me in danger, maybe even get me killed. You're going to do that because that's your frakking job, _Sir_." She leaned in closer. "But guess what: I'm alive. And I'm sitting on top of you." For emphasis, she moved her hips, coating his stiffness with her juices. He shuddered and shook under her ministrations, his cock flexing under her, almost jumping like a roasting bean on the pan. Left to its own devices, she was sure it would find its way back into.

She smiled down at her husband, who was clearly beginning to sweat from the build-up. "I can think of much better things we could be doing with our time here." As a final measure of her cruel mercy, she settled her entire weight on her husband's hips. Keeping her own balance was a bit of a trick given there was a steel-solid cock pressing into her most sensitive of places. Her focus beyond that delicious pressure was rapidly fading, but she pushed a final thought out before surrendering to it.

"I'm _alive_, Lee," she hissed into his ear as he sat up and wrapped solid, shaking arms about her.

"You're alive," her husband breathed into her neck. The smallest shift in position, and he was inside her again.

"You're alive," her husband whispered in awe, their movements perfectly in synch.

"You're alive…you're alive…you're alive…" her husband panted over and over, spearing into her and drinking her presence like a man dying of thirst.

"I'm alive," Kara Thrace affirmed, bringing their lips together again. There was the taste of saltwater between them now, and the feel of hands she dreamed of on her body once more. But no mere dream could capture the holy rapture of _them _in that moment_._

The Cylons and destiny might demand her life, but there, with her husband and partner, _there_ was the place she would forever call her own. And nothing, not even the gods themselves, could take it from her.

And when they cried out, again and again and again, it was as one voice and surely resounded in the halls of Olympus and fields of Elysium.

**Fin.**

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Remember: more reviews equals more fanfic!_


	13. Study in Blue

_Usual stuff: I don't own the rights to the characters or meta-story, and am borrowing them for fun but no material profit. If there's anyone official reading, know that I'm too deep in debt to sue. To my readers (all four or six of them): consider this and the next canvas over payment on a long-overdue IOU. You've stuck with me on this silliness so far, so I owe you for keeping me at it._

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Portrait of a Marriage – Study in Blue**

Of the myriad ways Kara Thrace had frakked and been frakked by her husband of eight years – and they could teach Aphrodite a thing or three at this point – she concluded _the_ single kinkiest position they used was man-on-top-face-to-face. She came to this epiphany while said (and already undressed) husband was busy divesting her of her dress blues, having already laid her out on his office desk and pulled her boots and socks off. She understood his urgency, given they'd 'reconciled' over his distance since Shaw's sacrifice the previous day.

Kara had seriously debated over whether or not to wear panties that day, heart-certain Lee would be driving into her before lunch. She'd opted to do so, and as a reward they'd been the first article he'd torn off her.

Perverse as it sounded, it was easier when he took her from behind or when she had him in her mouth. It spared her the soul-rending intensity with which Lee gazed on her while he slid into her. Those eyes alone, liquid and fiery at once, were often all that was needed to make her cum, often so hard she'd pass out. She couldn't hide or hold back from those eyes, which often left her feeling even more naked than he now had her.

Not that they weren't creative enough the rest of the time. Right after he'd been given command of The Beast, he had her tied face-down on their new bed, bare-assed and spread-eagled…then *ignored* her for nearly an hour while he finished paperwork…which soon had her so strung out it had taken just a brush from his cockhead against her pussy and she was lost for hours. Kara figured it was payback of a sort for either that time with the hand-cuffs during Solstice, or more likely her idiocy back on Caprica (which they tacitly agreed she'd spend the rest of her life happily 'atoning' for).

Those thoughts were driven from her mind, along with any semblance of coherence, as her husband pulled a fistful of her hair and his lips took up residence on her neck. He knew the precise location of each of her 'hot-spots', and so knew exactly how much force was needed to set her off, which likely explained why he had just three fingers inside her right then and his thumb brushing her clit. Kara shuddered in a second epiphany: Lee was going to make this last a long, long time. Thank the gods she wasn't scheduled for CAP until tomorrow…

Again, Lee shattered her concentration, abruptly shoving her head back onto the desk with far less restraint than before, making her see stars in the process. She blinked up at him, mouth opening to loose a verbal salvo of her own. He stopped it by working his fingers deep into her and hissing "Who are you?"

Kara could only think of the standard, undeniable truth they uttered so often. "Yours."

His response was to pull his fingers out of her – completely ignoring her small sound of distress – and took _two_ fistfuls of her hair, pulling her up to face him directly. "No," he ground out, his erection straining out and brushing her nether hairs. "_Who_ are you?"

Not 'what'? 'Who'?

Now it was her turn to reach out and grab some Lee's hair; no easy task given he kept it regulation-trim, but it was either that or her hands around his throat. And in her current state, there was every chance she'd just strangle him on principle. Kara found her fingerhold and held tight, pulling his eyes to her's.

"I'm your wife, you frakker!" She maneuvered herself so her ass was balanced on the edge of the desktop, then threw her legs around his hips, hooking her ankles and pulling them together. He fit into her perfectly, smoothly, as the gods surely decreed it be. But Kara barely noticed, focused as she was on making her point, re-staking her claim, and settling this idiot question once and for all.

"I'm your wife," she repeated, teeth clenched and eyes on fire. "An' you're…you're…!"

"Your…husband," Lee agreed, matching and tightening the rhythm that had instinctively begun between them. "Only yours." Tempo and force increased exponentially with each thrust, and it was merely minutes before both were sweating from the exertion of _restraining_ their impending release.

"Only…yours…" Kara echoed, the first to fall past that peak they'd both been driven to, easily pulling him with her. She let the darkness take her after that, Lee's reassuring weight settling atop her.

Why resist it, when she could look forward to waking up with her husband?

Those were her last thoughts for a long, long time.

**Fin.**


	14. First Watercolors

**Portraits of a Marriage – First Watercolors**

Lee Adama decided there were worse ways to work out one's marital issues than having your wife giving head in the middle of a forest, in the open, during a rainstorm. It seemed fitting, in a way; the issues and eruptions between them were nothing short of _elemental_. So it seemed appropriate they work them out while nature itself hammered down upon them.

Not that Lee was a passive party to it. He'd even, foolishly, tried protesting when his wife suddenly turned on him with that particular look in er eye. "Kara…"

"Shut. Up." Her hands were suddenly on him, undoing his belt with practiced ease and pulling him free of his pants. The frigid air was a better stimulant than a hundred hours aboard _The Rising Star_. Lee wasn't sure he'd ever been _this_ hard in his life, up to and including their wedding night on Tauron.

Kara's hands – those damnable, exquisite, knowing hands – glided over him, feeling as if they were searing the foreskin off. Her eyes pinned his all the while, holding him as surely as her fingers worked their usual magic on his flesh. _Gods _he'd missed this for the last...month? Had it really been that long since Kara, out of the blue, decided to up and desert her post?

Except she hadn't really deserted, had she? No, she'd gone and brought them here, to Kobol. Granted it had taken a minor mutiny and a Centurion boarding party to get his father and Roslin talking again. If only finding their way back to the rest of their little expedition now were as easy...

Kara vanishing from his LOS, his cockhead sliding past her generous lips, and that oh-so-accomplished tongue danced and slid across the underside of his length...all these things happening in such rapid succession Lee was quickly hard pressed (so to speak) to be able to even think of anything beyond those lips and that tongue on him.

Normally, these encounters of theirs were quicker, sharper. Time constraints were always against them, so they always finished up fast and got their asses back into the fire faster still. Their 'honeymoon', the occasions he was planetside, that comfortable cot they shared the day of the attacks; those softer times were long in the past, and Hades was ever lurking around the corner to claim either or both of them. So they hurried through their precious moments of intimacy, treasuring them as only they could.

At least, that's how it normally went. Today, however, Kara Thrace was carefully and deliberately tasting, nibbling, caressing his now-steel-hard shaft seemingly without a thought about time or place. Lee knew he should be shivering half out of his skin…yet he felt not the slightest chill either on skin or in his bones. If anything, he was sure he was starting to _sweat_. "Gods…Karaaaa…" he moaned.

Kara's hands running over his ass, those hands quickly coming around to cup and handle and tug on his balls, were enough to silence him again. Lee felt his eyes drift shut as her tongue and teeth laid claim to him. She was clearly determined to make this _last._

Lee Adama prided himself, with good reason, on having great self-control…save when it came to his wife. His own hands were no longer idle, his fingers threading their way through her damp hair, only to soon grab loose handfuls of it and urge her on. His hips got into the act, jerking in time with her tongues movements up and down and along him. That control, so intrinsic to him, was replaced with something equally intrinsic, equally strong and demanding.

He felt rather than heard the moan that rumbled through Kara's form when he pulled her head forward, his own head scraping the back of her throat, his pubes brushing her nose. She inhaled deeply, issuing another groan shaking him to his core and damn near causing him to cum right there! "No…no…" he ground out between clenched teeth.

His wife appeared to have different ideas, and renewed her assault. She used her teeth to scrape oh-so-lightly across him, and her cheeks to create such suction Lee was certain he would be pulled off his frakking feet! Kara moved, head dipping rhythmically, steadily, knowing full well the kind of agony she was inflicting…and carrying on, steadily, rhythmically. Lee's knees started to tremble and…

"Frak!" he groaned. There was no way to stop as he emptied himself into her waiting mouth. She swallowed him whole, holding him still and in place. They remained that way for a good many minutes, their breaths coming synchronized if a tad ragged.

Kara recovered first, although she appeared unsteady on her feet and a tad unbalanced; he hoped this little…whatever it had been…hadn't frakked up her knee again.

She regarded him coolly, even critically, and said "Lets find a cave or something."

"Good…good idea."

"Yeah. I wanna get outta these wet things and…warm up." She smiled that dangerous smile, chin dipping a little, looking almost shy as she asked "Don't you?"

Now it was her turn to tremble before Lee's answering grin, sharp and dangerous in its own way. He said nothing as he took her offered hand, and they went in search for shelter from the storms surrounding them.

And once they found it, well, the gods would hear _plenty_ from _both_ of them.

**Fin.**


	15. New Caprica: Solitary Male

_Submitted for your enjoyment…_

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Portraits of a Marriage – Male in Motion (New Caprica Series)

Ever since Kara's departure, Lee had divided his time between CIC (where nothing happened), the mess (where the food was getting marginally worse), his quarters (where he couldn't stand to so much as glance at his…their bed), and the gym. He was in the latter at that moment, trying to break the Colonial record on athletic jump rope. Pounding the punch bag had gotten old, fast, and he needed an outlet…otherwise he'd be too tempted to do something decidedly…foolish.

Like hop on a Raptor, land planetside, and _drag_ a certain someone back to where she belonged (by her frakking hair if necessary).

The only thing actually stopping him wasn't worry over his command or how that would be a directly counter to his standing orders. It was the reality of what Kara herself would do to him if he took such a risk; likely as not, it would make what Phelans' heavies had done to Fiske look like a love-tap.

So he jumped rope, sweating away body mass he wasn't sure he could stand loosing, because he had nowhere else to be that wouldn't result in grievous damage being provoked. One could stare at a phone that refused to ring for only so long before the urge to tear it off the wall became undeniable.

Thankfully, for both Lee's state of mind and the structural integrity of the _Pegasus_, the comms chimed up suddenly. "_Actual to CIC. Repeat, Actual to CIC._"

It was Dualla's voice, which had Lee quietly cursing hard again. What the frak was she doing up and about? He quickly toweled his face and arms dry, then set off at a brisk jog to reach the CIC.

He wasted no time on formalities upon arriving. "You're under doctor's orders, Ensign," he said to Dualla's ponderously-moving bulk. Where before she'd looked like she'd been playing 'dress-up' in an older brother's clothes, now she looked positively ridiculous wearing a uniform jacket two sizes larger than before to accommodate her distended belly. The girl was seven-months pregnant and needed to be off her feet.

"I traded Horace for a half-shift, Sir," she replied with appropriate formality. Lee huffed, puffed, and decided it wasn't worth pressing. Emil Horace was Dualla's fiancée and _Pegasus' _serving DRADIS tech. Since a quarter of his crew had mustered out and gone to the surface, young Horace had taken over duties for Communications and Navigation as well. How the boy managed to juggle all that _and_ keep Dee happy was something Lee couldn't figure out.

"Okay, so…" He only then noticed Dee was holding a desk receiver.

"It's for you," she said, handing him the receiver and then waddling to the opposite side of the tac-desk.

"Who is it?" Lee asked.

"It's for you," Dee repeated, eyes up on the DRADIS displays.

"Who is it? Oh, right," was all Lee could moan, intuiting who was on the other end. Taking a fortifying breath, he spoke into the mouthpiece and asked "What do you want?"

"_I need a favor."_

"Is that right?"

"_I know you've been holding a bunch of antibiotics for the pilots."_

Because he was tired and pissed off, and because the voice on the other end was doing bad things to his composure, Lee decided to draw this out a bit further. "Where'd you hear that?"

"_It's Anders. He's got pneumonia, Lee. I think…I'm scared he might die…"_

"Frak," was all Lee could curse. "What does Doc say?"

"_That he's got fluid in his lungs…"_

"Commander?" Dualla called out.

"Stand-by," Lee said to the receiver, then looked up. "What?"

"Something's out there," she said in response, eyes still on the DRADIS.

"Wuh? How can you see anything in that soup?" He focused on the screens himself, anxious to disprove his eager-to-please subordinate and get back to his phone call. "There's nothing…"

A quartet of red-tinged contacts suddenly appeared.

"…there…oh, frak." Lee felt his chest heave. "Frak!"

"Oh my gods," Dee breathed. "The Cylons...they've found us." She started to shake, which had the helpful effect of shaking Lee out of his own shock. The battlestar Commander took control, and started barking orders to the rest of the personnel present. "Sound Condition Red! Dee, get a channel to _Galactica_. Link it...Dee!"

The junior officer tore her eyes from the DRADIS, settling them on her Commander. "Sir?"

"Open a channel to _Galactica_," Commander Adama repeated carefully. "Link it into the line I'm on. Quickly!"

"Aye-aye." Fortunately for her gravid state, Dee was just two paces from the comms board, and a few commands tapped into it resulted in desired channel opening. Lee took another breath and brought the receiver back to his mouth.

"_Galactica _Actual?" he queried. "_Pegasus._"

"_Go ahead, Pegasus," _replied his father.

"Starbuck? Still there?"

"_Here_,"Kara Thrace confirmed.

"Four Cylon basestars just jumped into the zone. They haven't launched Raiders yet..."

"_We've got them on DRADIS,"_ the Admiral stated. _"I'm readying the alert fighters."_

"Kara..."

"_Jump," _Kara stated. _"You've got to jump. Now!"_

"_We can't just leave you..."_

"She's right." Lee didn't recognize his voice for a moment, hardly able to believe he was saying this.

"_We can't just leave all those people,"_ the Admiral argued.

"_You have to," _insisted Kara.

"She's right," repeated Lee, again disbelieving his own words. "We're in no condition for a fights. Its taking forever to get to action stations over here."

"_Sir, you've got to go." _Starbuck repeated, nearly screaming it.

"Kara..." Lee started, voice dying on the second syllable. What could he say? What protest could he offer?

The other half of his heart and soul saved him the trouble. _"Lee, jump that frakking ship! Go now!"_ With that, the line from the planet was cut, leaving the Commander and Admiral to themselves. Lee could barely make out Captain Agathon's voice over the line, reporting the _Galactica_ was finally at Alert One, asking if they were launching fighters.

"_No,"_ the Admiral said, half to himself, leaving Lee to wonder for a moment who he was addressing. _"We're jumping away, now. But we'll be back."_

"Frakking right," Lee affirmed aloud (to his later embarrassment), then turned back to his crew. "Start the clock, Mr. Hoshi. Dee, get the emergency coordinates entered."

"Set, Commander," Dee reported barely ten seconds later.

"Clock set and running, Sir," Lieutenant Hoshi called out. "Jump in five...four...three..."

"I'm coming back," Lee vowed to one who wasn't there, but who he knew would hear it.

Hoshi continued his countdown. "...Two...one."

Commander Lee Adama closed his eyes as his world twisted sideways, leaving his heart and soul back on that barren world. He found himself strangely unmoved however, white-hot anger - with his father, the Cylons, Sam Anders, Laura Roslin, the virus that separated him from his heart...and with himself most of all - filling that void nicely for the moment.

tbc


	16. New Caprica: Solitary Female

**Portraits of a Marriage – Solitary Female (New Caprica series)**

It had been a miserable month since the Cylons had grabbed her, and Kara was starting to feel her resolve falter just a bit. She supposed that was only natural, given the mindfrak they'd been pulling on her since day one, supplemented with plenty of physical humiliation.

The hardest bit to endure wasn't the mock-up apartment skinjobs had put her in. Heck, the surroundings were downright pleasant: carefully temperature-controlled, soft carpeting, nice water-pressure in the shower, plenty of hot water in the same. The meals they were feeding her made military rations she'd been subsisting on as appetizing as cardboard.

She could even overlook how some of them had taken some sick delight in first stripping her buck naked, _then_ chaining her to a wall somewhere and proceed to whip the crap out of her for a day or three (or four). Kara had never had any issues with her body, and gods knew she and Lee beat each other up often enough that a few more bruises should hardly register. It occurred to Kara the beatings might have done a bit more damage than just bruising, given how her back itched lately, but she hadn't quite worked up the courage to look in a mirror yet.

Even having Leoben as a 'roommate' wasn't that much a trial. It was actually the highlight of her incarceration so far, as it (a) allowed her to exercise her considerable imagination to find new and wholly original ways to (b) kill the motherfrakker, again and again and again. Sure, he resurrected, but thus far he'd refrained from any kind of heavy retaliation. That actually worried her, but Kara figured so long as she kept her guard up she'd be able to fend him off.

Then there was the fact they were keeping her naked. She supposed they figured it would wear on her psyche or something, make her feel more vulnerable and exposed or some psychological crap like that. It left her more annoyed more than anything, mainly because the fabric of the sofa and some of chairs irritated her ass when she sat on them. Kara was realistic enough to know this would change if the skinjobs started fooling with the apartment's temperature; she feverently hoped they'd hold off on that little tactic, at least long enough for Lee and the Old Man to get their ass's back here.

No, the _hardest_ part was one of the few things that made the tedium of the days semi-manageable. The apartment had a single window, large and set high over the dinning table. Kara had no idea what floor her nominal cell was on or exactly which way it was orientated; she figured it was at least positioned away from the settlement itself, as it only showed the sky overhead. The irony being, the sky being a constant reminder of what... of what she was missing...

Flying. Freedom.

Home.

Lee.

The empty sky taunted her, mocked her, and was as painful a torture as anything the skinjobs had done to her yet.

Kara didn't dare look up and out that window for more than a minute a day, lest Leoben catch sight of the tears that inevitably resulted.

No sense giving the frakker the smallest opening into her already-cracked head.

The days were tedium incarnate, which only magnified both the torture and indignity.

Kara would wake up, usually alone. The frakkers didn't provide any sheets or blankets; presumably another element of their mindfrak, trying to make her 'fear' for her personal security, maybe even drive herself crazy worrying about one of them coming in some night and violating her. Obviously they hadn't lived in a cadet's barracks, or been on the receiving end of some serious hazing pranks. No-one however had come in and disturbed her, luckily for them; Kara wouldn't have minded really, as she could have used the outlet for her anger.

There were a few times she'd awakened to find Leoben nearby; sometimes on the bed itself, more often on the empty bureau of drawers against the wall. Kara would sit up and head into the attached shower, ignoring him completely. She'd wash herself down quickly and efficiently, unwilling to give him a show or give him an easy target.

After her shower and drying herself off with a towel deliberately too small to serve as a wrap, Kara would face a day that invariably involved some variation of eating, ignoring Leoben (who would appear there, whether at her bedside or come in later) while he prattled, pace the length of the apartment, more ignoring of Leoben, more eating, more pacing, sitting and stewing and wondering about Lee and the Old Man, concocting impractical escape plans, more pacing, more ignoring Leoben, and still more eating.

The highlight of her days were two moments, the more consistent one was her falling back asleep for the night. The other, more infrequent moment was when she'd get to dispatch the latest copy of Leoben. This was when she got the most satisfaction, mainly because after the first time Leoben had gotten the message and generally kept himself at arm's length. Thankfully, he apparently couldn't help himself however, and would eventually come close enough to just touch her. On the arm, the shoulder, the neck, it didn't matter; the first brush of his fake skin on her's was all the provocation she needed.

The first time, Kara satisfied herself with crushing his throat with her forearm.

The second time, she drove the non-existent edge of a butter knife into his right eye, then did the same into his left.

The third (and thus far last) time she drew out a bit: a knee to his groin, his nose and face caved in by the forceful application of several serving dishes, and finishing with his throat opened with a piece of broken crockery.

After that, Leoben had kept himself well out of the danger zone, so it was just a matter of mentally drowning out his droning on about destiny and streams and whatnot. Kara managed thus far, mainly be repeating the Ten Great Myths of her childhood to herself. Unfortunately she was already up to the Twelve Labors of Heraklez, which was number six on the list, and didn't think that repeating them all would be quite as effective a second time around.

So Kara Thrace put her mind towards developing some contingency planning, in the event her husband _didn't_ make it back before she ran out of anti-Leoben distractions for herself. It was irritating, mainly because long-range planning like that was her husband's forte, not hers. But damned if she was going to make it easy for the frakker by a single, bloody hair.

A dull thud shook the room on what Kara estimated was the 31st day of her imprisonment, prompting her to glance up at the window. The current Leoben copy was already there, staring at the column of smoke that rose up from somewhere distant. "Frakking insurgents."

Kara kept her smile to herself, and picked up where she'd left off in her mental recitation of how Heraklez cleared the stables of Argeus in a single day.

**Tbc...**

_Obviously there's more to come. Please be patient while I try to convince the muse to actually *tell* me the rest of it._


	17. New Caprica: Solitary Male,Second Canvas

**Portraits of a Marriage – Solitary Male, Second Canvas (New Caprica series)**

The morning the 32nd day since they'd jumped away in the face of overwhelming opposition found Lee exactly where he'd been at that same moment in the day for the previous 28 days: standing under the showerhead in his personal head, letting the frigid water tickle and hammer the nerves in his scalp like a thing alive. He'd just returned from the gym, his knuckles rubbed raw and shoulders screaming for relief.

Two months in, and Lee was as calm and focused as ever, mentally as least. He was laser-focused upon his singular and overriding goal of getting the frak back to New Caprica. This unfortunately left him ill-disposed to tolerate any delays or distractions, no matter how practical in origin. A fair number of his crew had suffered verbal lashings that would have made physical ones seem like love-taps.

Nobody blamed him for it, really, as they all understood that emotionally speaking, Commander Lee Adama was climbing the walls of _Pegasus_.

His only relief seemed to be his daily visits to the gym and firing range. The ship's surgeon, one of Cottle's better students, wasn't entirely pleased with his commander's choice of coping mechanisms; understandable given how often Lee's knuckles needed treatment for scrapes and bleeding cuts. The ship's armorer wasn't much happier as Lee almost seemed determined to go through the whole of _Pegasus' _stock of small- and light-arms ammo. Lee spent hours on end firing off everything from his own general issue CAL Mark 23, the Dargon XIX favored by the Marines, even several sessions with the four-barreled Stallion hold-out pistol he'd taken off of one of Zarek's men an age ago. He interchanged this activity with reacquainting himself with both the Picon P90 and CAL USG submachine guns, and rebuilding his proficiency with the Leo Storm Carbine and the ship's few working Gemenon Military Assault Rifle.

When he wasn't beating his hands to a pulp or reducing paper targets to tatters in a hail of lead, Lee was in almost continuous conference with his father and a handful of other officers. The outlines of a rescue plan had begun to take shape, although it was so thin and nebulous it might as well have been nothing but mist. Too much depended upon the circumstances on the ground, and until they found a way around the jamming the Cylon basestars were throwing up, they wouldn't know frak there.

A month of strategy meetings that accomplished nothing, sessions in the gym that merely gave him more hairline fractures in his knuckles, and long stretches in the firing range that left the scent of gunpowder eternally burnt into his nostrils...and it was all Lee could do to _not_ order the _Pegasus_ back into New Caprica's orbit and just blast a path through to the surface...

Lee recognized the danger in such thoughts, as much from his father possibly relieving him of command (entirely justified in doing so) as from his finally loosing all good sense and putting such an idiot plan into effect. He'd been _strident_ enough in asserting they needed to get their people off New Caprica that both the Old Man and many of the others were starting to looking at him a bit askew. Lee had done his best to dial it down in recent meetings, but it was just so damned _hard_ keeping his mouth shut on the subject.

What none of them knew or could likely guess was the underlying reason behind his borderline mania. It went beyond simple worry over what the settlers might be going through under the Cylon's 'care'. Kara's reports about the conditions on Caprica were terrifying enough in what little she had seen personally, but Lee sometimes wished she hadn't brought back the Buccaneers along with the Arrow; at least then they wouldn't have nearly as complete a picture as they did of the Cylon's immediate-term plans. Agathon's skinjob had helped fill in some of the blanks, which only made it worse.

The Cylons want to reproduce, the old fashioned way…except they couldn't. It seemed the skinjobs were sterile when it came to cylon-on-cylon mating, though whether that was because they'd screwed up their original schematics or because Artemis decided to personally intervene, Lee had no idea. The fact Agathon's pet skinjob had been able to give birth to her little girl only confounded things. The toasters hadn't been deterred and, according to Kara and the C-Buccs, they'd tried the next best thing back on Caprica. He had zero doubts they wouldn't try something similar on New Caprica.

And Kara was down there, in the thick of all that. For all he knew she was laid out like Anders, sick with pneumonia, and in the 'care' of the Cylons. Just the thought of what they might be doing to her…

Lee managed to keep a tight reign on such thoughts, and as a precaution had left written instructions to his XO and their acting CMO to watch him for any signs of cracking. If it came to that, they were to sedate him, or just club him unconscious, then lock him in a closet somewhere until he calmed down. Under no circumstances was he to be allowed to take the _Pegasus_ to Action Stations and attempt a solo mission of any type.

Oh, he'd willingly risk his own life on the craziest, most hare-brained scheme conceivable if it stood even a point-oh-five percent chance of getting him back to Kara. But he had neither the inclination nor the right to risk the rest of his command in the process. Even if he were so inclined, there was the rest of the fleet to think about. It wasn't as if there were an abundance of spare officers for them to draw upon…

Disparate thoughts and notions suddenly clicked together in his head, confusion and doubt swirling away with the spent water down the drain. He hastily dried off and dressed, muttering lowly to himself the whole while.

"Single raptor…new frequencies…she's gotta have an in somewhere…just the pilot…can't assume anything…"

Even before he'd finished dressing, Lee had pulled pen and paper out of his desk and was scribbling his thoughts into something resembling coherent planning.

Barely an hour later, he was standing in his father's stateroom, explaining his sudden brainstorm with a clarity and order that, by rights, should have been utterly lacking.

"We need facts on the ground before going in. That much is obvious. But due to Cylon's jamming we can't communicate with the colony. Again, that's obvious."

"And you've got a solution?" Captain Karl Agathon asked, not testily but not wholly respectfully either.

"I do," Apollo nodded. "Its one that we've had all along." Lee felt a visceral, almost sadistic thrill shoot through his spine as he saw first Agathon, then his father work out where he was going with this. As expected, Helo looked outraged and his father…well, Lee couldn't read what was going on in his head right then. Whatever it was, it didn't look like outright disapproval.

Then again he'd had the same look when news of their six year marriage had finally broken, and Lee at the time had been bracing for a dressing down of the ages. Instead the Old Man had simply nodded and dismissed them (Kara had insisted on being at his side at the time, and confessed on the way home she was sure she'd lost a full stone in pure sweat) without comment. He'd barely spoken to either of them for a week after that.

But that was the past. It was the present Lee needed to focus on, and outlining his plan certainly helped. Granted ninety-plus percent of it was being made up as he spoke. Lee took it as a sign of just how frakking _desperate_ he was if he was channeling his wife's out-of-the-box thinking (which, given their relationship, took on rather _colorful_ meaning).

It was only when he realized the rest of the room had been staring at him for nearly a full minute that Apollo realized he'd stopped talking, and he needed several more seconds to clearly recall exactly what he'd proposed. It was a struggle not to flinch or show his true reaction when he did.

The Admiral's only immediate comment was "I'll put it to the prisoner myself." Lee had heard the Old Man had been making regular visits to the holding cell, had some comfortable furniture put in, but to that point hadn't paid them much mind. It...hurt a bit, knowing the skinjob was keeping his confidence more than Lee himself, if that made any sense given he'd kept his and Kara's marriage a secret as long as he had.

Lee looked up sharply when he realized something else was being said. "What? Sir?"

"I said: 'return to your ship, Commander'," the Admiral repeated calmly, even gently. "And please get some rest." Lee couldn't stop the snort of laughter that order elicited, but his CO deigned to overlook it. Instead he stated "We're going need you _more_ than just barely functional soon, Commander. Certainly not falling-over-dead like you are now."

"Aye, Sir," Lee nodded, saluted, and left the room as ordered. His feet carried him to the hanger deck purely on autopilot, the rest of conscious thought being taken up by the equally conscious effort _not_ to think about what his wife might be enduring at that same moment.

**TBC…**


	18. New Caprica: Female, in Dark Oils

**Portraits of a Marriage – Female, Rendered in Dark Oils (New Caprica series)**

Kara had lost track of the number of days she'd been in captivity now. It was definitely past hitting double-digits now, maybe even hitting triple; there was no way to be sure anymore, and _not_ simply because of the drugs they'd started feeding her.

The skinjobs hadn't been content with just the usual mindfraks anymore, and were even doubling down with some heavy-duty body frakking on top of it. Not ordinary rape, mind you, as if that were something preferable. They'd apparently decided to supplement thoroughly screwing with her mental state by screwing with her body's chemistry just as thoroughly, if not moreso.

At least, she _thought_ that's what they were doing. Whatever was in the food they gave her was making everything turn into day-glow colors…or so her otherwise spotty and fragmented memory suggested. If it were souped-up psychoactives, that might explain the random bruises and aching joints she kept waking up with; she'd experimented with the heavy stuff (_once_) just after her first term at the Academy, and had somehow ended up in a cheap hotel room with two dislocated shoulders being tended to by Helo (_who refused to even acknowledge her for six months afterwards_).

The frakkers had taken most of the furniture out of the apartment, including the bed, probably in an effort to keep her from tripping and breaking her fool neck while tripping out on their drugs. It was probably providing them with a lot of laughs as well, given they were keeping her naked as well.

The last couple days…last couple times she'd woken up, it had been curled up in a ball in some corner. Her sense of time had gotten screwier than ever, so she had no clue if she was out of it for hours or days or longer. All she knew now was that she'd come to, hungry and thirsty as hell, and wondering where Leoben was. The skinjob had absented himself along with the furniture, leaving her to stew in her own juices until someone slipped a plate of 'food' under the door.

Kara had reasoned that whatever they were feeding her (tasting alternately like wet cardboard or overspiced pasta) was likely causing her blackouts, so she would hold off eating as long as possible. Unfortunately, the skinjobs were timing it so she couldn't resist for more than an hour at best. Besides whatever drugs they apparently soaked her meals with, they added some kind of appetite enhancer, leaving her positively ravenous as soon as she woke up. As they'd robbed her of any external distractions, up to and including frosting the apartment's only window, she now existed in perpetual twilight with a handful of empty rooms and an equally empty stomach.

The latter as expected forced her to actually eat the crap they provided, survival instinct overriding everything else, and between 30 to 60 seconds later the gray walls suddenly lit up in fluorescent colors. Kara had tried initially to remain calm and centered, simply allowing the flashing colors to dance all around her, ultimately melting into one swirling mass without definition or pattern. It was only when these perpetual motion rainbows started reaching out to grab her that she lost it.

_Big time._

She _kept _loosing it big time after that, if even half her half-imagined/half-remembered struggles had even the slightest basis in reality. The instant the first flash of psychedelic light hit her retinas, Kara was sure she was screaming and pounding the nearest available surface with both fists…then began kicking at _whatever_ was grabbing at her ankles and legs. _Whatever _it was that was grabbing at her, if indeed it was anything at all, didn't feel like a Centurion's claw. It was…warm and soft, actually, which made no frakking sense…almost like someone was covering her with a blanket and…and rocking her to sleep while she was yelling her damned head off…

That seemed to be the recurring image: her, wrapped in a psychedelic blanket, being rocked back and forth in the arms of…of…and she was yelling and screaming and clawing at…at…

Try as she might during her moments of lucidity, Kara couldn't focus enough to recall faces or features. There were only voices, telling her strangely comforting things that frankly scared the crap out of her even more than the day-glow blobs that kept grabbing her.

_You have to behave now, Kara, so we can take care of you._

_Behave like a good girl, Kara._

_You're so, so special to everyone, Kara._

_Everyone loves you, Kara._

_Everyone wants to take care of you, Kara._

_Let us take care of you, Kara._

_That's why you're here, Kara, so we can take care of you._

_We love you, Kara._

_You're worthy of our love, Kara._

_This is what if feels like to be loved, Kara. _

_Doesn't it feel good to be loved, Kara?_

All that, coupled with how _soft_ and _gentle_ and _real_ this phantom blanket…and how _soft_ and _gentle_ and _real_ all these phantom voices were…Kara was pretty sure she was loosing her grip on reality…insofar as anyone could be sure of something like that…

By the tenth trip they put through (or maybe it was just the fourth or fifth?), Kara thought she'd stopped struggling quite as hard as before. Part of it was how…_familiar_ the whole process had gotten. Another part was how that phantom blanket seemed to get even _softer_ and _gentler_ and _realer_ the more she was _inside_ it. Was this what it was like being in the womb again? All safe and held and cherished? Kara couldn't even mind how that imaginary blanket rubbed all over her breasts and between her legs and between her asscheeks…because it was so _soft_ and _gentle_ and _real_ and how _nothing_ could compare to it…except maybe how Lee would…

…how Lee would…

…thinking about Lee would immediately make her wake up or come to and have her screaming and crying her lungs out…which made the imaginary blanket go away and leave her cold and hungry and shuddering again…which was plain _sick sick sick sick sick _because when that happened Kara felt herself shudder hard and _cum_ so frakking _hard _she nearly saw stars! And that _hurt_ so much she _never ever _wanted to _cum_ like that again!

And _that_ was how Kara was absolutely sure she'd lost her frakking mind, because she was actually ready to force herself stop thinking about Lee, just so she could stay in that _soft _and _warm_ and _gentle_ imaginary blanket of day glow colors and imaginary voices and let them rock her away and tell her how much they loved her. She didn't even mind how those imaginary voices had started telling her to open her legs or kneel down or bend forward or bend backward or crawl like a dog or open her mouth or…

She didn't mind, because she was sure she was dead by then, because she was willing to stop thinking about Lee so the blanket and voices could keep on holding her and caressing her and…and that meant she had to be dead because if she were alive that would mean those hands and lips and fingers she was sure she felt on her skin weren't imaginary…which logically meant that…that…that…that…

Kara shuddered again, vision clearing for just a moment, seeing only gray wall before her.

A voice that must have been her's croaked something like "Lords of Kobol…kill me…please…"

Perhaps the gods were listening, or simply catching up, because everything in sight was suddenly wiped away by an almighty roar and wall of fire that knocked Kara completely flat.

Consciousness, like the phantom blanket and phantom voices and Lee and sanity, vanished beneath that fire.

**TBC…**

**

* * *

**

De author seez:

_I should warn all reading here that this will be my last posting…for the next month. Starting tomorrow I'm beginning a personal NaNoWriMo challenge, fruits of which will probably appear on my LiveJournal (someday). I promise this miniseries of Portraits will be finished afterwards, after which I'll get back to other things as well. At least that's the plan, and we all know how well those work out some days. Feel free to review frequently and often in the interim. See you all in May._


	19. New Caprica: Montage of Actions Male

_**De author seez: **yes, I'm still alive. Like I'd dare dying on you guys. Here's the end of the New Caprica series. More afterwards._

* * *

**Portraits of a Marriage: Montage of Actions – Male (New Caprica Series)**

The rescue plan was, Lee had to admit, the personification of KISS: _keep it simple __and__ stupid_.

Step one was inserting Sharon Agathon (pondering why his father actually officiated that wedding, frankly, made his head hurt too much) onto the planet's surface. There, she was to infiltrate the Cylon command post or whatever it was and find a way to switch off the jamming. She also had to make contact with Tigh or whoever was running the resistance and make sure they were ready to evac to the ships.

Step two would be a little trickier, as it would require that _Galactica_ jump into orbit on the far side of the planet and look like she was about to engage the basestar guarding the planet. Once the other basestars moved to intercept, _Galactica _would jump away again and _Pegasus_ would jump in behind them, firing all cannons and missiles and generally raising havoc.

Step three would be trickiest of all, given _Galactica _was to jump from its decoy spot into an atmospheric freefall over the colony, launch its Vipers to provide fire support for the ground-side resistance. _Galactica _would then jump clear of the planet. _Pegasus_ would have to hold the line until the last civvie was away before rejoining the rest of the fleet. If worse came to worst, the crew would abandon ship and set the battlestar to full automatic, so it would crash into the nearest basestar.

Okay, maybe it wasn't "simple" or "stupid". Because Lee had conceived most of this himself, inspired by gods alone knew what, "absolutely frakking insane" about covered it.

By rights, his father should have dismissed it out of hand. Instead, he promptly ordered Agathon to start calculating the necessary coordinates for the three jumps. Even Lee was taken aback but the decision, especially as there had been no time for rehearsal exercises and no way of managing it. It was literally an all-or-nothing roll of the dice.

Sharon's insertion happened in short order, with the spaceborne civilian fleet relocated to a thick nebula on the edge of jump range in still shorter order.

Everything was moving so fast, and it seemed all Lee could do was pace the command deck as the plan unfurled around him. Perhaps everyone was simply moving so they didn't have to stop and think that this insane plan of his would likely get them all killed. His own crew barely looked his way as they labored at their duty stations.

Lee made a deliberate decision to absent himself from the Command Deck once Agathon was away. He would have just been pacing the deck and staring at the DRADIS, and the last thing he needed was to spook his crew even more than they already were. Why Hoshi hadn't relieved him after the Admiral accepted his plan was beyond him, since it was clear he was utterly off his rocker.

So Lee confined himself to his…their…Commander's quarters and did all his pacing in there. To relieve nervous tension he was ransacking the place that is, knocking over papers, books and furniture. No surprise the Marine guard outside his door had been doubled during this time. He expected to be relieved with every call from _Galactica_, but either the Old Man was unaware of his meltdown or was simply choosing to overlook it, unless the elder Adama himself had finally cracked up as well. Not a pleasant thought, the both of them now as crazy as Ka…Ka…Ka…

All this time, and he still couldn't so much as think her name. Lee had no clue what he'd do when…if…he saw…if she didn't…if she didn't make…

It was suddenly a very good thing that he'd ordered that he be barred from the firing range, and that his personal sidearm be confiscated. A very good thing, indeed, as the worst case scenarios spun around in his head until there was nothing but the worst case in there. He was almost certain he'd already cost the Old Man his daughter, so why rob him of his son as well?

When the go order came, roughly four planetary days after Agathon's insertion, Lee was back on the Command Deck. Perhaps he had known that would be the day, as he'd awakened calm and centered for the first time since…since right before they'd had to run from New Caprica. Per the Admiral's orders, he had evacuated all but two dozen crew from _Pegasus_ and deployed his Vipers and all but three Raptors to cover the civvies. At least those remaining ships would have some way of defending themselves if neither battlestar made it back.

There was no way to relay messages between the battlestars, at least not without giving the whole game away. _Pegasus_ was to wait 30 minutes before jumping into the combat zone. Racetrack had been doing reconnaissance at long-range for weeks, so they knew the relative position of the cylons. The toasters tended to be predictable, rather ludicrously so, in their tactics. They would charge in at the first sight of _Galactica_, especially if they thought they could catch it unawares. At least that was their hope, but hope tended to be a treacherous bitch of late.

Still, there was nothing else Lee could do but wait the allotted 30 minutes and stand ready. He consciously restrained himself from re-confirming Action Stations and weapon's status.

The clock hit the 30-minute mark, and _Pegasus _jumped into a scene from hell.

Lee would only ever remember flashes of it all: the abundance of DRADIS hits…the blood red icons of the basestars…panels and instruments sparking and exploding…voices he did not recognize on the wireless…his voice, steadily calling out target priorities…and then for useless status reports…his crew calling out answers…more noise, more chaos…voices from elsewhere, cut-off in midsentence to the sound of fire and screaming metal…and finally…

Finally,his calling out "Abandon ship." It took an extra tug on the arm from an Ensign to remind Lee to evacuate himself. With a small shake of his head, he looked back at the now-collapsing Command station and said "Thank you." It was stupid and sentimental, but it was also _right_.

Lee turned and sprinted after his crew, unconsciously observing the ages-old tradition of the senior office to be 'last off' their ship. The trio of escape Raptors, some emptier than they should have been, lifted off just as the flight pod succumbed to the latest barrage of missiles from the surviving basestar. Heedless of the damage they would cause to the already-dying _Pegasus_ all three jumped the instant they cleared the hanger, arriving at the rendezvous point almost instantly.

_Galactica _was there, and Lee afforded himself a moment of relief, tinged by the fear that while the ship may have escaped there was no guarantee her master had. His pilot requested an immediate landing, and surprisingly was granted it. Did this mean he had lost his father and the crew was anxious for his successor, or simply that he was needed on deck ASAP? Lee was so lost in his pondering that he didn't even register their being lowered into the hanger deck, or the Raptor's hatch opening.

He barely even realized he was being virtually pulled out of his seat and enfolded in a tight hug. When it all finally did penetrate, he readily returned the embrace, breath coming now in unsteady gasps.

"Dad…"

"We did it, son. You did it." His father pulled back a bit, beaming like mad.

Lee almost returned the smile, but there was something he needed to hear…to know…and his expression must have said it all as the Old Man led him outside to one of the returning shuttles. While the rest of the assembled refugees began chanting "Adama, Adama!" and hoisting his father aloft, he watched as Anders and several others disembarked the small ship.

But he didn't see Ka…_her_…with them. And that meant…

Before that thought could finish, Lee felt himself lose his balance as the medics gingerly eased out a stretcher holding a body that was strapped down and covered in blankets. Even from a distance, he could make out the face…the face he hadn't dared dream about in months. His legs only barely acknowledged his command to move him closer, close enough to hear the men speaking between themselves. "Easy there, carefully, don't tip her…"

Anders noticed his somnambulistic approach and moved to intercept. "Lee? Lee, look at me. Look at me!" the ex-jock nearly shouted, putting strong hands on his tired shoulders. "She's okay, Lee. We found her…look, she's alive. She's unconscious and they…she's okay, Lee."

"She's…?" his voice, independent of his brain, somehow slurred.

"She's okay," Anders affirmed.

"She's okay," Lee heard himself parrot, no longer really there. "She's okay…she's…okay…" He felt his shoulders sag and knees lose all their bones. It was too much to hope, to much to believe it was true. But he did, he believed.

Not caring who saw or thought, he crumpled to his knees, burying his face in both hands.

And, for the first time since she's left on that damned courier run to that damned planet, he wept.

**Concluding...**


	20. New Caprica: Female Profile Study

**Portraits of a Marriage – Female Profile Study (New Caprica Series)**

When Kara woke up, she said nothing and did nothing, because everything was different. She concluded the toasters had gotten tired of frakking her up with just chemicals and were rolling out the big guns. Why else would they have created a perfect replica of Life Station, right down to the endless antiseptic stink and starchy hospital gowns and comfortable-as-a-solid-stone beds? Sure, they filled it with walking wounded and moaning people; probably some poor civvies they roughed up just for her.

Yup, they must have known they had gotten into her already-broken brain and decided to mess it up worse. Lull her into accepting this little performance so she would follow their commands or whatever. Gods, they couldn't just kill her, could they? They had to draw it out… and…

Someone who looked exactly like Lane Ishay came into view. Sounded like that harpy, too, as she said "Captain, are you awake now?"

It was just too much; because Kara found herself…_believing_ it was really Ishay speaking to her. Which meant this really _was_ Life Station, on _Galactica_. And that meant…meant…

It was too much to accept, to hope, to even try to believe, so Kara simply closed her eyes and went back to a dreamless sleep. She faded into the darkness, certain to her soul everything would be _different_ again when she opened her eyes.

Except it wasn't different. When she opened her eyes, it was still Life Station, it was still full-up with injuries, and it still stank like Life Station. For some reason, the stink bothered her the most. Made her nose itch, bad, so she raised a hand to scratch it.

Another hand beat her to it, one bigger than hers, but knew exactly where to scratch. Kara blinked several times, trying to decide if she should indulge this or slap the hand away for such presumption. It was hard to think of any cons, beyond the general principle that _nobody_ except…that _nobody_ should ever touch her. It was hard to think in general and this internal debate of hers was draining her fast.

Intent upon giving the hand's owner what for, or at least a nice, ugly glare, Kara felt her eyes roll upward and brain short out completely at the sight of Le…sight of Le…sight of…of…

Unconsciousness was much, much easier to deal with than the toasters making a copy of Le…Le…her hus…her hus…

* * *

The third time she woke up, Kara immediately glanced to her right, which was where the toaster's ugliest trick had been sitting last time. There he was again, looking all smug and beautiful. Sure he looked strung out, his eyes bloodshot and generally looked like he hadn't slept in forever.

Nevertheless, it still clearly Le…Le…her husb…her husb…_that frakking bastard_ under all that distracting realism the toasters were throwing up. And _that_ was crossing the frakking line. _Nobody_ was allowed to copy her husba…her Le…_him_ like he was some cheap knock off. He was saying something, leaning closer to her, even putting that wonderfully gentle hand on her exposed arm.

That was it. That was all she could frakking stand. On sheer instinct, her free hand shot out and grabbed the first thing within reach. Unfortunately, it was only a plastic container and didn't make a terribly effective weapon. Still, it surprised _him_ sufficiently that he stumbled back when she clipped him in the head with it. He'd let go of her, obviously, but that wasn't enough. She'd frakking _tear_ that face off him, because nobody had a right to wear _that face_ except…_him_…and she'd…she'd…

Someone was screaming somewhere, but she ignored that because she had to tear that face off that toaster…because…that…she needed…

Kara leapt out of the bed, up-ending another tray nearby and causing some beaker to fall and shatter. She snatched what looked like the largest piece and knelt on the copy's chest, arms drawn back to bring improvised blade down onto _that face_. Except the copy was stronger and caught her arms in mid-swing, managing to deflect her aim just enough where it missed hitting him full on. She was nonetheless gratified to see she had given him a good and bloody scratch.

There was more shouting now, all around her. It was making her very dizzy. _He_ took advantage of it (of course _he_ would) and pushed her arms away, knocking the broken glass from her hands. This was followed by a very solid punch to her jaw, strong enough that she should have spun completely. Instead, it further unbalanced her, causing her head **to **impact directly with the metal frame of the bed.

Her last thought then was how _he_ sure punched like her Lee…

Lee…

Lee…

Then, there was nothing more.

* * *

Things were different the next time she woke up. The stink confirmed it was still Life Station, but now she was in one of the alcoves with curtains. She was still in a damned uncomfortable bed, although the blanket was softer and she felt some kind of…something around both wrists.

The biggest change was the Old Man standing there, at the foot of her bed, looking as sad and forlorn as a beat-up stuffed rabbit she remembered owning in another life. Seeing she was awake now, the Admiral drew a breath and asked, "What d'ya hear, Starbuck?"

"Nuthin'…" Kara found herself slurring, tongue heavier than expected. "M' I really on _Guh…Guhlahti…_" It was more fatigue than fear that kept her from saying the name.

Adama smiled that sad smile of his and moved forward to brush a stray strand of her hair. "Yes, you're aboard _Galactica._ We got…Anders pulled you out of that hole and brought you home."

Something cold gripped her. "Lee…?"

"_Pegasus_…died holding the cylons back while we evac'd the colony. We got pretty much everybody off."

"But…?" It was a trial just to get that one word out, the unspeakable leaving her nearly paralyzed.

Adama gave her a small, disapproving frown, and then shook himself. "Lee's…fine, Kara. He made it off before _Pegasus_ blew up." He kept talking even as her starved lungs heaved with fresh air. "He's been here virtually the whole time since. At least until…" Adama rubbed his forehead and gathered himself. "It's been four days, Kara. You didn't wake up…"

"Whu…where's Lee?" She cast her eyes around for her hus…hus…why was it suddenly so frakking hard to just _think_ that word?

"He's sedated. He was…frak. He was hysterical after…you…" The Old Man literally wilted as she watched. Kara marshaled her strength to sit up and reach out to the man who was in all ways her father, only to find she couldn't do more than shift a little.

"I…I can't…move," she ground out. Fear of a different sort gripped her now. "Oh, gods, please…am I…please, I can't be...?"

Again, Adama frowned in confusion. "What? No, no." He shook his head and lifted up the edge of the blanket covering her, allowing her to see the padded restraint covering her wrist. "We…we need to make sure you're not going to hurt…anyone."

"Anyone?" Now it was her turn to frown in confusion. "Like who, for frak's sake?"

"Kara..." Adama's face mirrored the absolute despair in his voice, which was all that was needed to open the floodgates of memory.

Kara began to squirm, trying to pull her arms free of their restraints, the only things that kept her from fleeing Life Station and _Galactica _entirely. "Oh, gods...oh no, please...please, no...gotta...gotta get away...didn't...oh gods oh gods no no no no no I didn't...didn't mean...didn't think...no no no no no no NO!"

Kara knew little beyond her hysteria. She was only barely aware of Adama calling to others, and one of those others injecting something into her IV drip. There was no pause in her babbled denials and curses and pleadings, even as she drifted into a morpha-induced sleep.

* * *

She was in the same place when it wore off. At least that was her assumption. Kara kept her eyes closed for a while - not out of fear, mind you, as much as...uncertainty. She felt the same cocktail of groggy giddiness that accompanied waking up from the 'trips' the toasters put her through towards the end.

A small tug of her wrists confirmed she was still being restrained. No surprise there, especially if the disjointed images that came to mind about Le...about Le...about waking up and seeing Le...seeing Le...

Kara winced at the headache this weirdness brought on. Oddly, this also cleared her hearing enough where she could make out another voice, close by. Virtually on top of her in fact. It was a _familiar_ voice, too. One that made her want to fall into that abyss in her mind once more.

"Lords of Kobol, hear my prayer."

Okay, maybe she'd stick around a bit longer, just to make sure this wasn't some new delusion the toasters were trying out.

"Please...please...help my wife...help her find her way back home. She's been lost for so long...I swear, I'll protect her forever more. Please, bring her back. We need her..._I_ need her..."

Well, if this were a toaster-built delusion, she would take it. Did it even matter at this point? It just took a bit more...effort to get her eyes open, the sight greeting her proving worth it: her hus...her husb...frak! It was _him_, sitting there, head bowed and hands clasped tight as one would in prayer. He hadn't noticed yet that she was awake.

Kara wanted to say something smart, something quintessentially Starbuck.

"Hey," was all she could manage.

_His_ head shot up, bleak eyes once again taking light. "Kara?" he whispered, a prayer in itself.

"Yah." She swallowed what little spit she had, trying to get her voice to work. Trying to sit up provided all the inspiration she needed. "Admit it," she slurred. "Y'jus...like keepin' me...tied up..."

_He_ nodded, a weird laugh escaping. "Yeah, that's it..." That wonderful smile faltered and vanished, tears and desperation taking there place. "Gods...Kara..."

"I'm sorry," she shook her head. "I'm sorry..."

"No, no. No, Kara."

"I'm so frakking sorry..."

_He _leaned in, _his _lips on her cheek, _his _fingers stroking her hair. "S'okay, s'okay," _he _was whispering to her.

"So...sorry..."

"S'okay..."

They remained like that for a span, her apologizing and _him _forgiving her. Eventually, despite herself, all reason and all she knew to be real, Kara began to believe her husband's forgiveness. How could she not, when forever after, he was there each time she'd open her eyes, whether from sleep or illness.

Just as he'd pledged, to her and the Gods.

What else was there to do, but believe?

* * *

**_Author's afterwords:_**_ I know, I know its been a thousand years (give or take 999 years). Hopefully there are still enough readers out there who're willing to drop a review or two, maybe enough to actually inspire a few more chapters here. Hope you enjoyed this._

_Until next time..._


	21. Charcoal Sketches

**Portraits of a Marriage: Charcoal Sketches**

Her first time back in the Viper since her rescue from New Caprica was certainly one for the books. She managed to not only fall out of formation and miss her target, but also managed to ram her fraking plane into Kat's. All in the space of five minutes into the eval. Lee was not pleased and made it clearly known once they were taxied back to the Flight Deck.

"If you want to get yourself killed, _do it without destroying one of my planes_!"

In all their years of marriage, they'd had plenty of shouting matches over every conceivable issue, large and small. This was however the first time it _didn't_ lead to them tearing each other's clothes off. For one thing, it would have been impractical given they were both in their flight suits; the damned things were tough to get into and out of quickly. That they were in full view of the gods and everyone else on the flight deck, and gathering more attention by the second, was a distant second consideration. Plus it was unlikely the Old Man would accept the excuse they were engaging in some 'morale boosting' if they…well…

Kara heard herself muttering something vaguely apologetic, vaguely conciliatory, and still more vaguely like her usual saucy comeback. Her CAG stared at her for a full minute, and then grabbed her arm the way parents do misbehaving children; he pulled her off the deck with a clear yell of "Life Station, now!" The crew thought they knew the score between the CAG and his problem pilot, at least well enough to think they understood what they were seeing.

Both the CAG and the pilot knew different. Just _how_ different proved as much a surprise to Starbuck as it would have everyone else. Oh, him waylaying her into the nearest available storage closet, that was SOP. She'd caught enough of the crew on both _Galactica_ and _Pegasus_ doing the same, and being caught in turn. It seemed for the longest time as if the only clueless one was the Old Man. More the fool them.

It wasn't even that much of a surprise when he propelled her inside with an almighty shove. One hard enough that she stumbled and lost her footing. It wasn't the first time she'd ended up on her knees before her husband, so it didn't bother her as it probably should have.

No, what made this…encounter…stand out so was what he said immediately after dogging the hatch behind him:

"Okay. Hit me."

Starbuck could only stare, eyes hooded and poorly concealing her confusion. Apollo did not relent however, taking a threatening step closer. "C'mon, Kara. Hit. Me."

"Are you out of your fraking mind?" she hissed in response.

"Are you out of your frakkin' mind?" Apollo mimicked, tone and sneer the sort normally reserved for playground taunts. "You know you want to."

Did she want to hit him? Sure, he'd made her crazy enough over the years they'd danced in (and out of) the ring. But actual _violence_? Against him? Kara couldn't think of a single instance where she'd wanted to slam him for any reason; even his public dressing downs were more a turn-on than anything else. She didn't want to even think why she found…used to find him tying her to the bed so damned fun.

But here he was, telling her to _hit_ him. He was _taunting_ her to do it even, as if that'd work any better. She was sorely tempted to demand what the frak was that about…except she already knew what it was about, and almost sighed in pity. Kara knew her husband better than any other soul and could see his plan here clear as day. It was like that upset right after Shaw blew herself and the old Guardian basestar up – his "rape" of her coming out of the shower – and it underlined one his most annoying traits: an egocentric guilt complex the size of the Twelve Colonies.

His mother, her mother, Zak, shooting down the _Olympic Carrier_, spacing those lunatics on the _Astral Queen_, Flat Top getting himself blown up on the deck, her getting shot down over that moon, her getting locked in that 'farm' on Caprica, them getting lost for a day and night on Kobol, and every other godsdamned disaster they'd endured since the end of the worlds; Lee took personal responsibility for all of it, or at least acted so. It was so egotistical as to be pure hubris, and it pissed Kara off no end, mostly because it just demonstrated how human Lee was and therefore as imperfect as her and the Old Man.

And she could see that same guilt overwhelming him right now. She could also see the modest scar on his left cheek from when she'd attacked him in Life Station, and it confused her no end why he wasn't attacking _her_. Hades' black balls, he'd barely _touched_ her since they'd escaped New Caprica, managing to find one and a dozen excuses to _not_ be in the same room with her for any length. He'd even gone so far to sleep on the floor or in the SPQ, leaving the bed and everything else in our used-to-be-storage-closet private quarters to her alone.

Perhaps he'd been too disturbed by her newfound tendency to sleep nude, kicking the covers completely off the mattress and lying flat on her back, arms and legs straight like she was restrained. Or he just couldn't take how she had yet to get back into the swing of life on _Galactica_, basically hiding in their quarters the whole flipping day, eating only when he brought her meals. He'd found her in all states of undress, staring at the walls or organizing and disorganizing the room, sometimes watching but _never_ approaching. By rights she should have been packed off to solitary as it was clear she was useless for pretty much everything, or so the on-going absence of the Old Man and Tigh indicated; neither had been the least shy in the past about straightening her out by kicking her in the ass (sometimes literally).

Being put in this re-evaluation flight had been…unexpected, to say the least: Lee had just shown up that morning after she'd eaten breakfast, thrown her flight suit and helmet to her, and said, "Wheels up in twenty, Starbuck." They'd even put her in one of the newer-looking Mark VIIs, probably the last one off the _Pegasus_ production lines before Lee flew her into the furnace.

Well, her performance must've been one for the books. She'd recall later seeing that even the Old Man had come down to watch Lee chew her a new one, although he kept to the background right then.

Lee's taunting pulled her attention back to the present. "Anders said they found you in an apartment. Guess current digs aren't up your new standards, huh?"

As taunts went, this one was wordier than most, which almost ruined the effect Lee must've been shooting for. It was the _tone_ that was getting to her, more than the words; she'd used the same trick on him a few times, so turnabout was fair play here. Having no idea how to respond, Kara did the sensible thing and kept her trap shut.

This apparently was what Lee was expecting, and he pressed his verbal attack. "Anders also said they found you stark naked. Guess…"

_That_ got a reaction, and a hot one to boot. "Don't! Don't even…"

"Even what, Kara? Even _suggest_ you're…" The implication and the word went unspoken; it didn't need to be to hang between them.

"I'm not a whore!" Kara was in no mood or mind to be rational about this; else, she'd have seen how badly she'd misjudged her husband's actions.

But then, Lee what said next pretty much guaranteed she wouldn't be thinking straight. "There were at least twenty pilots and staff in Delphi who'll say different."

Kara blinked once, twice…then completely lost all reason and _charged._

* * *

It was the first time Lee had so much as hinted he knew anything about those miserable 250 days between their encounter in the elevator and _That Night_ on Tauron. He'd only learned of it through 'tavern talk' one night while the _Triton _was in airdock over Leonis, several of his fellow pilots simultaneously boasting of having bedded the legendary Starbuck. The only thing that saved the fools was the crush of bodies between them and Lee himself, which was fortunate as the aforementioned fools started filling in the context.

As soon as they started comparing, then arguing over dates and locations, it deflated his fury significantly as he worked out the timeline. This had the additional (and to Lee's mind supremely beneficial) effect of neutralizing many of those same stories, the idiots getting their times and places so jumbled so as to contradict each other, and therefore to be dismissed as so much idle boasting.

Not that Lee was left unaffected by it. Truthfully, it infuriated him no end that Kara had been that despairing that she'd traded herself so poorly. He'd been more incised with himself for not seeking alternate lines of communication than her (non-existent) office phone during that whole time, and partially explained his…volcanic tendencies with her. He had been such a fraking coward in those days, and Kara had paid for it in ways he didn't like thinking about. It was likely he was overcompensating a bit.

Okay, more than "a bit". Their first session in a storage closet here, right after the _Olympic Carrier_, should have been a clue things were askew between them. After all, what kind of husband tries to deliberately scar his wife?

Then again, what kind of wife leaves deep bite-marks on her husband's scrotum?

Things like this should have occurred to Lee, but were lost amid the crush and rush of the war. Even his transfer and promotion to _Pegasus_ hadn't afforded him time or space to ponder their marriage, and he was honest enough with himself to admit part of this was simple avoidance, the possibilities he was more like his father or worse too forefront to face.

But then, who in their right mind would object to being given such free access to the body Kara Thrace? And truthfully, there was that uniquely male part of him that liked her having equally free access to him. Small wonder they'd developed some shade of emotional dependence, for lack of a better term.

No one seemed to appreciate just how close he'd come to cracking during her imprisonment on New Caprica, or how much he was teetering on the same precipice now. He'd forced himself to watch passively while she faded in and out, wandered about their quarters and nighttime halls like a ghost, too much the coward and fool to step forward. To be fair, he had no idea how to proceed with her and was terrified of making the wrong move.

When he wasn't keeping Kara in personal LOS or ensuring she was under reliable watch, Lee kept up with reorganizing their combined air wing, but this occupied very little of his head space. Most of it was taken up with trying to divine what had happened to his wife after he'd abandoned her, if only for some clue as to the way forward. He'd pressed Anders for every detail possible about the complex she'd been held in and what he'd seen in the retrieval. The ex-jock had seen more than he realized, and the picture he painted – combined with Kara's condition upon rescue – was the very definition of inhuman.

Cottle had rattled off the ingredients of the chemical cocktail the Cylons had apparently been feeding her, Lee recognizing some as potent hallucinogens. His own queries had been limited to whether there was any detectible internal damage and how soon the CMO thought the crap would cycle out of her system; anyone listening would have thought he was merely worried about getting his lead pilot back. That poison must've lingered longer than they'd thought, given how she'd attacked him upon awaking. Lee couldn't remember much of what happened afterwards and did feel particularly bothered by this.

Watching Kara lie still as a board when she slept, or thoughtlessly wander about was more than enough to scare the crap out of him.

* * *

The Admiral had understood, overly so Lee thought. He'd assigned them private quarters immediately, directed him to see to the air wing, but otherwise kept out of it. He kept out of sight completely, if truth be told. The Bucket's hallways were always crowded almost beyond capacity; Lee might have thought the Old Man was actively avoiding them all.

So Lee marked the days, hoping and praying Kara would recover herself somehow. He couldn't quite bring himself to touch her yet; something in her now-etheric manner convincing him she'd literally crumble to dust if he did. He certainly couldn't sleep in the same bed, not when she was lying still and stiff, apparently expecting to be…violated. That left him catnapping (you couldn't call it real sleep) on the floor, which felt like it was royally fraking up his spine.

Patience, unfortunately, wasn't cutting it. If anything, Kara's daytime absence and nighttime wanderings were getting noticed by entirely too many people. None of the pilots or knuckledraggers had approached him about this yet, but he'd heard plenty of whispers bouncing off the deck plates; nothing he need to attend to personally, but he knew it was only a matter of time before some ill-timed comment reached him or his father. Lee really didn't want to see how the Admiral would react to such talk; his own reactions were likely to be bad to the point of criminal.

Trouble there was, again, he hadn't the foggiest idea how to safely proceed with…whatever…he was going to do. What he _wanted_ to do was take advantage of the unsettling-yet-strangely-inviting pose she adopted when she slept, which was just too fraked up for words. Their mutual forays into the bacchanalia fringe were one thing, but given neither of them were in their right minds, Lee wasn't prepared to risk giving into _that_ particular urge, certainly not until Kara herself was in a state of mind to actually enjoy it.

Ironically, pondering in that slightly self-destructive vein delivered unto him what was (hopefully) the path that would bring Kara home. Or, alternately, get him killed. Either option would have served adequately right then.

24 hours later he had her back in the air, ostensibly for an evaluation for her reinstatement to flight status. He'd _planned_ on washing her out ahead of time over any of a thousand small infractions involved in her idea of piloting. He'd _planned_ to declare her unfit for flight, walk away, wait for her back in their quarters – likely after she'd built up a good head of steam - and let the fighter that still lurked within her (the scar on his cheek was evidence enough of that) to emerge and drag the rest of his wife out with it. Sure he might be sucking his meals through a straw for the next few moons, but to have his Kara back was easily worth the price.

What he didn't anticipate was her fraking up so spectacularly all on her own, or rediscovering just how ingrained the role of CAG had become within himself. His dressing her down on the flight deck hadn't been just for show, and the words had flowed out of his mouth without thought, rage at her recklessness this time (which upon reflection was a whole different sort from the kind of abandon she normally operated with) making him momentarily forget his plan.

Thankfully catching sight of his father, staring down on them from the walkway, was enough to shake him out of it. The Old Man didn't need to see Kara like this; the rest of the crew could frak themselves, but the Old Man was family. Lee evacuated them to the nearest available storage closet and summoned the storm as best he could.

Hence the playground taunts.

Hence letting slip he knew about _that time_.

Hence letting her take the first punch. And the second.

And the third.

He started punching back at the fourth, because he needed at least one eye _not_ swollen shut, if just to see the status board with.

She was a wild animal at that point, clawing and snapping while trying to get a good grip on his throat with her teeth, and Lee responded in kind, as he gave vent to weeks of frustration and fury. Kara managed to make a few tears into his flight suit, got in a good couple body shots, her knee even connecting with his groin twice. Lee barely noticed, as he was equally focused upon practically throwing her into the nearest wall or pulling both those strong arms out of their sockets to use a clubs.

It was a display of some of the most primal urges lurking within any human. That it was the two of them simply made it more elemental.

* * *

They emerged eight hours later. Exhaustion had driven them to twice take a break from attempting to break bones, but as always their respective energies fed one another and their dance of pain had proceeded nonstop. They hadn't exchanged a word longer than five letters the whole time, their screeching and snarling surely warning everyone away. Even normally overprotective Helo seemed to be keeping a distance.

Not that either of them made an inviting sight as they made their way slowly toward Life Station. Kara had to keep hold of Lee, who was clearly having _significant_ trouble walking, while she herself was limping and sporting what looked like a dislocated shoulder. Their flight suits were ruined and bloodied, and both their faces a most fascinating collection of welts and bruises. Small wonder they were afforded such a wide berth in the corridors.

Cottle was decidedly unsurprised to see them, and made his displeasure at the damage they'd managed to inflict on one another clear as day, examining them separately without the least grace. Lee proved slightly worse than Kara, given that he had allowed her a head start. Both were sufficiently ambulatory, so Cottle willingly released them to their quarters; more likely, because he was sure another explosion was in the offing and wasn't interested in cleaning blood off the floor. The CMO was funny like that.

Kara again wrapped his arm around her shoulders and helped him back to their home. Lee did his game best to carry his own weight, but she had managed to leave deep bruises in very tender areas that would take time to heal. Besides, any touch with Kara was welcome, no matter the pretext.

She refused to let go even after they'd made it to their quarters, half dragging him and releasing him to fall face-first on the bed he'd all but abandoned. Lee couldn't quite mute the cry of distress caused by his unceremonious fall, and he tasted blood from where he bit his lip. By the time he managed to sit up and slip off the remains of his flight suit, Kara had already doffed her own and climbed in beside him. Lee took a single, shuddery breath and prepared to move off.

"I will kill you if you get out of this bed." Her words were soft and slurred (fractured jaws tend to do that), but clear all the same. Not being a fool, Lee settled back down onto his back.

"Don't…touch me for awhile, 'kay?" She'd rolled onto her side, brought her knees up to her chest, and looked about as relaxed as an overstretched rubber band.

Lee however kept his hands to himself; eyes fixed on the pipes in the ceiling overhead, and waited for sleep to come to them. It proved less of a wait than expected, and for all the crap that he'd have to answer for when he woke up, it was welcome.

His Kara had made her first step back to him, and that made everything in the universe right.

**Fin.**

* * *

**De Author Seez: **_reviews? Please? _


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